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Rarely do you come upon a game that has such quality as Skyfox. The game takes up about 60K of code on a disk although a tape version is planned, and takes a vast amount of time to load - up to five minutes on disk!

The game is based around baddies (it is not made clear whether they are terrestrial or alien) attacking your base and various installations of yours. The enemy attacks at low level with motherships - which look like huge flying saucers - and waves of ground tanks. The motherships launch the tanks, so it is good tactics to wipe out all the motherships first and then take on the tanks.

What you take on the baddies with is your Skyfox-fighter plane. This seems to be able to do everything from hovering to 3000mph full flight. The screen (cockpit) display is excellent with instruments up and the 3D effect control section with instruments and dials everywhere. The main radar display sits in the middle at the front and this is what you consult most regularly. There are two options available with this. A sort of forward view with a sight which helps with height estimation. However the default setting of a bird's eye view is the best as it allows you to see whoever is behind you.

Whilst your base is still active, you can call upon the base computer to supply you with help and status information, also a map of the combat area with all of your foes colour coded.

The computer display swings out a la Macintosh style and is a good effect. You use this screen to navigate by using the autopilot. The autopilot will get you to a specified area or to the nearest enemy at top (3000mph) speed. The problem is that, at this speed, you tend to overshoot due to the time spent slowing down.

Once an enemy is located you can use one of your three weapons, the lasers for general use and knocking down the tanks, the radar-guided missiles for the motherships and the fighters, and the heat speakers for the fighters.

The guns will knock out anything, but they take some time to use on the motherships due to their armour. Missiles are limited to five of each type, and tend to be inaccurate, you have to aim them very close to the target to be sure of hitting it first time, if it misses it will just circle around until it hits.

You can land on your base to refuel and rearm - if it still exists!

Climbing up to the cloud layer makes the screen go blank (clouds of course) and the machine locks up. It then takes a couple of minutes to fly through the cloud layer, actually it is accessing the disk for the other aspect of the game - air-to-air combat. This can be very exciting and is not for the novice; also, make sure you are fully repaired as the bad guys seem to have their total air superiority and huge numbers of them try to zonk you.

With enough vigilance and determination (and practice) you can do it though. The best plan is to take out the motherships with lasers, then you can conserve the missiles for later use.

The options of the game are vast. There are the usual difficulty settings for the game, and a large number of scenarios from training missions to 'large scale invasion' - not very nice at all, to the interesting patterns of 'the wall', 'alamo' and 'cornered'!

Overall, this is one of the best Commodore 64 games out. I hope they manage to get it onto tape or a lot of people will be very disappointed - or Commodore disk drives will increase in sales! Brilliant is all I can say.