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A fair few months back, Lucasfilm revived a bit of wartime nostalgia with Battlehawks 1942. Now Lucasfilm have moved from the Pacific to the English Channel with Their Finest Hour, a game based around the aerial battles over the green fields of Britain in the early years of WWII.

As with Battlehawks, the first task in hand is to choose a nationality by way of selecting from a list of available aircraft. While the Germans have a large amount of planes at their disposal, ranging from the small but nimble workhorse of the Luftwaffe, the Messerschmitt Bf 109E-3, to heavily-armoured, albeit sluggish, bombers such as the Heinkel He 111H-3, the poor old Brits have to make do with only two attack planes - the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire.

Missions vary depending on your choice of country. The British planes are mainly used for defence purposes, picking off invading Luftwaffe forces, while the opposition has a wider choice of either flying bombing runs into mainland airspace or guarding the bombers from British attack during their missions - your choice of German plane determines the type of missions available to you.

After you've fought a mission, a screen appears outlining the number of enemy and allied planes damaged and destroyed, and a summary of your current status. Medals and promotions are available to pilots worthy of reward, with a cold POW camp or even death awaiting those unlucky enough to fail. Pilots are saved to disk and used throughout the game until killed or retired, and whole campaigns can be fought, the computer stringing together a number of missions to simulate life as a serving airman.

Although The Finest Hour is obviously an immense piece of software, with an enormous amount of thought having gone into both the design and presentation of the package, it's slow to play. Even on our mega-speedy 386 PC, play was verging on sluggish - and on slower machines, the action is reduced to a crawl.

But, in spite of that, I did have fun playing Their Finest Hour - there's an incredible amount of game in there. If you have got a fast machine and enjoy big combat simulations with plenty of depth, check this out. Those who like their flying action faster should try F-15 II or Bomber instead.

Superbly packaged and presented combat simulation with immense depth, let down by the slow pace of its action on anything other than an extremely fast PC (at least 26 Mhz).