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One of the best combat flight simulators to appear on 8-bit machines was Mirrorsoft's Strike Force Harrier which combined the accuracy and realism of a pure flight simulator with the excitement of a first person combat game without sacrificing the integrity of the flying routines.

After a lot of hard work, Strike Force Harrier has finally taken off for the ST - and very impressive it looks too. Unlike many conversions from 8-bit games where little or no effort is made to take advantage of the ST's extra memory and processing power, the programmers of Strike Force Harrier have taken the 8-bit game to bits (no pun intended) and rebuilt a 16-bit version enhancing and improving over the original wherever possible.

All the graphics for the game were redesigned to take advantage of the ST's low resolution mode, and much of this work was done on Mirrorsoft's own graphics package Art Director. New flying features have also been added, the most impressive of which allows you to actually fly through mountain ranges - doing 750 knots down a valley at 450 feet with mountain peaks towering either side of you is really quite exhilarating. The result of all these innovations is a fast-moving, smooth scrolling game that exudes atmosphere.

Once the program has loaded you can choose between combat, combat practice, or flying practice. You are recommended to select the latter to start with to get the feel of the Harrier's controls. It also gives you the chance to fly around and admire the view.

You can fly combat missions at a pilot, commander, or, if you fancy yourself as a 'Top Gunner', you can try the 'Ace' setting, but be warned Aces will find the enemy MiGs much more of a handful and may suffer from blackouts or even red-outs. The Harrier is also most difficult to control when flying in Ace mode. Another nice feature on the option screen is the demo mode which allows you to 'log' your flight into the demo buffer and play it back time and again until your friends are sick of seeing how good a pilot you are.

You have two discreet tasks in combat mode. One is to liquidate all enemy tanks, and the other is to shoot down any MiG fighters you encounter. By climbing above and diving below the clouds you can alternative between the two at will. When at altitudes of 16,000 feet and above you can take special surveillance photos of the ground immediately below, thus identifying all ground targets making it far easier to locate and destroy them.

The enemy may fire heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles at you, both of which must be dealt with in a different way. Heat-seeking missiles can be 'distracted' by the use of flares which fool the missile into thinking you are elsewhere. The chaf (basically just a cloud of silver foil) used to fool radar-guided missiles works in much the same way giving them a large and tempting target at which to aim. This is the method used successfully in the Falklands to overcome the dreaded Exocet. Hint: If you use chaf while hovering, don't hang around to see if it works!

The area over which all the action takes place has five landing sites that are used for refuelling and re-arming. Being a Harrier you can land and take-off vertically which makes life much easier. Apart from the 'down' flight vector used for vertical take-offs and hovering, there are two others, horizontal which let you fly the Harrier like a normal jet, and 45 degrees - a kind of mixture of the two.

The engine sound is very realistic, although sudden, flap and weapons are always keyboard-controlled. Each time you fail, a message appears telling you the reason for the premature ending to the game, with such gems as 'your wings were ripped off because you were flying too fast' - beats being stopped by the police!

For those who fancy blowing up tanks and picking off MiG fighters while experiencing a state of the art flight simulator, Strike Force Harrier is for you.