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Well, it's been four years in the making, but at last Hawk - oops, I meant Birds Of Prey - has touched down. But has it been worth the wait? Well... sort of.

Let's make no bones about it, Birds Of Prey is an excellent flight simulator and, as the name suggests, there's no shortage of dogfighting action. On a technical level it's astounding, and probably its more impressive aspect is the number of planes you're given the opportunity to fly - no less than 40 individual combat aircraft!

Birds Of Prey is much more the thinking man's simulation - very much in the MicroProse mould - and not really the more simplistic, combat-orientated Interceptor-type affair that many of us were expecting. That said, it's not all just flying from waypoint to waypoint and falling asleep in-between. There's more than enough hard-nosed action to keep anybody happy. The 3D update is surprisingly okay, considering how much the program is having to juggle, but somehow it just doesn't seem like the result of four years' programming.

Ultimately, what you've got with Birds Of Prey is a game that's tried to do a bit of everything and comes off surprisingly well at the end of it. If anything it leans a little too far towards the technical side of things (reading the manual is an achievement in itself), but nevertheless Birds Of Prey comes wholeheartedly recommended to all flight-sim fans.