Alerion is a vertical-scrolling shoot-'em-up game. You fly over a landscape, shooting at everything that moves and most things that don't. You choose whether to target ground or flying targets, but the default control keys are quite fiddly.

There's a nice fade from the instructions to the game and back, and the 256-colour play screen has good, smooth scrolling. There are lots of fast-moving, colourful sprites, but they aren't very big, and they're not all that successful at portraying the smooth tumbling and twisting movements. Only one object, your plane, has a shadow; all the other '3D' effects just don't look right.

Some of the sprites, particularly your plane, are difficult to see against the landscape - a repetitive mix of field, forest and water. This is particularly bad when explosions and craters pockmark the land. It could be that there are just too many colours similar to each other.

The digitised sound is good, but limited to plain gunfire and explosion sounds, plus two digitised words, 'Home' and 'Wave'. These are vital, as there's no other indication that you've reached your objectives. The home bases are a nice idea; you go back as far as the last one you reached when you die.

In all, full of good things, but not worth £6 more than the near-identical Quazer.