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Scramble! Scramble! I say, you chaps! Sausage suckers up the blue end! Time to say chocks away, get upstairs and prang the Kaiser's cabbage crates before they start chucking handfuls at your Blighty kites. Eh? What's the matter? Don't you fellahs savvy me banter, then? Well, I s'pose I'd better calm down a bit.

As you may have surmised, Wings puts you in the cockpit of an SE5 biplane of the 56th Aerosquadron, flying alongside your ten stout-hearted comrades over France during World War One. The game starts on March 2, 1916 and your objective is simply to survive the remaining two years of the war, flying over 230 missions before you meet the German ace, Das Rittmeister.

Before you can actually join the squadron, you need to earn your wings by completing basic training. Here you get to sample the three types of mission you will encounter during active service, strafing ground targets, bombing installations, or shooting down enemy aircraft (in the training flight you have to destroy a target balloon).

In strafing missions, you have to pilot your aero down a diagonally-scrolling road, shooting up anything and everything on it - infantry, trucks, oil barrels, tents, armoured cars - but *not* the Red Cross lorries.

Bombing missions are vertically-scrolling jobbies, in which you have to shoot down oncoming aircraft and dodge flak clouds while lining up targets to "drop your load" on.

Most of your career is taken up with dogfighting though, and this is the most exciting of the three sections, mainly because the action is all in 3D and it plays like a simplified flight simulator. The pilot always looks toward the nearest enemy plane, so turn in the direction he's facing, like up the Fokker in the gunsight and open fire! Only repeated shooting will destroy the other plane, so keep on his tail or one of your colleagues could finish him off, stealing your "kill". Skilled pilots use fancy aerobatics to evade destruction, but exceed the abilities of your plane and the engine splutters and the plane stalls. Remember, planes aren't cheap, and the CO won't be too chuffed if you bury yours in some French vineyard!

Wow! This is fun! In fact, it's probably the most enjoyable Cinemaware game yet because you don't have to work out strategies, just get in the air and get blasting!

The strafe-the-trucks section is great and the bombing mission is better than most Amiga up-the-screen shoot-'em-ups, but the best bit is undoubtedly the 3D section, because it's just been so perfectly programmed.

Away with complicated dials and gauges - just follow the pilot's nose to the enemy, then blow his wings off and watch his plane plummet downward.

As usual, Cinemaware have slaved to get the game's atmosphere perfect, and the superb graphics, sampled aircraft sound effects and even the post-mission piano ditties really recreate the sights and sounds of the period.

The game starts off quite easy, but with over 230 missions to fly Wings is going to keep even ace pilots entertained for many a happy hour.