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Well, was it worth waiting for? 'Fraid not. You've seen this game before in several different guises - Spy Hunter, Stainless Steel, etc, etc...

Both versions look pretty, but they... are... so... slow. The Spectrum is the worst culprit.

Basically, the game comes in two bits. There's the Spyhunter bit in which you guide Jesse Mach and his supersonic bike through rush hour traffic in search of villains.

He must zap the cars with the baddies in - but must avoid killing off innocent bystanders in their VW beetles. If you accidentally on purpose wipe out too many law-abiding citizens the cops will be after you. Then there's the Gunfight section - like old Wild West arcade games.

Now if you reckon that this combination is state of the art for 1986 then where have you been for the last five years?

Controlling the superbike is fairly easy but it does have an annoying habit of doing wheelies when you don't want it to. I thought you had to have a machine that accelerated pretty fast to be able to do this anyway. And fast this isn't.

You can also "damage" the machine by bumping into kerbs, cars and lorries. Inflict too many dents and it simply stops - whereever you are, it just stops dead and you have to wait while a little message scrolls across before you can get things going again. If you really want to get things going again...

You can identify the baddies on the Spectrum version as they drive a hatchback and fire at you. On the Amstrad the baddies' cars can be any colour, except red or green.

Messages appear at the bottom of the screen telling you what to do - or if the police are chasing you.

After a couple of minutes zapping through the traffic, a message will flash up telling you that a robbery is taking place up ahead. Your bike slows down and the screen display changes to the shoot out screen in which you simply have to zap the robbers as they emerge from the building they've been robbing.

You simply move a cross-hair sight around the screen and hit the fire button. On the Amstrad version, the robbers shoot back.

This bit on the Spectrum is amazingly easy, and very boring. Then it's back on the road again for another round of the same sort of stuff.

I doubt if even the most fanatical Street Hawk fan will find much to recommend this game. After such a long wait, the end result is predictable and awesomely average.

Street Hawk would make a good budget release - but as a full price offering it just doesn't make it.