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Tally-ho! Time bandits at 3 o'clock! 3 o'clock, 28th July 1914. Or, any time up to the present day.

Time travel's a funny old thing, isn't it? Before the 332 bus to Bristol so cruelly crushed the life out of Tim Tucket, I found out that we both shared a childhood experience. Being a musical type, the young Tucket used to dayream of going back in time to the early '60s and claiming credit for all pop innovations. He figures that, since he knew all the lyrics to the Beatles' songs and when they were released, he could set himself up as Timmy T and the Bootles and beat them to stardom by a few months. Then he could break the band up and form the Rolling Pebbles, then become Zoggy Stardust and so on, marching down the years as pop's greatest superhero.

I also had a similar dream as a child, but it wasn't quite as idealised as Tim's. I used to dream of going through time with a case of Kalashnikov rifles and boxes of ammo doing them out to various civilisations to see how history would be altered. Cortez would have had a much harder time slaughteriing the Incas if they'd been lurking round the jungle with AK47s, and I'd imagine that John Wayne movies would have been vastly different if the Apache had laid down interlocking fields of suppressing fire instead of riding around on their hroses and whooping a lot.

Well anyway, whereas Tim's dreams of rock and pop domination now exist only in his zombie mind, it transpires that my adolescent schoolboy dream is one that's shared by other people, as there was a crap film called The Final Countdown, the main plot of which involved a modern aircraft carrier getting zapped back to 1941 to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Unfortunately, the scriptwriters wimped out of a fantastic dogfight finale by having all the planes called back to the carrier at the last minute, so we never got to see how a load of F15s would have fared against waves of slow, poorly armed Zeros.

This sort of trans-temporal conflict is exactly what Dogfight's all about, as it covers 80 years of aerial warfare from WW1 to modern day Syria, and allows you to pick and mix planes of any era to see just how mismatched they are. Dogfight's really a collection of three quite separate games, so I'll cover them one at a time.

Firstly, there's the duel mode, where you pick one of two planes from the same era and go all out against the computer in mano-a-mano machismo until there's only one plane left. Each pair are evenly matched, with similar performance, so it's up to your skills as a pilot as to who wins. The thing is, the computer opponent isn't one of these drones that just follows you around loosing off occasional heat-seekers, nor does it cheat by changing its position when it's out of your view.

The intelligence that the computer planes show is frightening, and it's great to see the screen on a reverse tactical view, hurl your plane about and just watch your enemy respond to your random movement. Both planes get damaged in increments, and once they start to pour smoke, they're much easier to spot from a distance, and also look brilliant as the smoke works like the trails left by planes at air shows. It's a shame that all the planes don't trail smoke all the time under the guise of vapour trails or something, as they look just great.

The second part of the game is the missions section, and this is the bit that's standard flight sim stuff. Although there are only six missions (one for each time period) you effectively get twelve, as you can play either side. You choose to either attack or defend several locations, and although you only control one plane, you have to place up to thirty additional planes on various patrol routes. On the WW2 mission, for instance, you take off in a Spitfire from an airfield in the south of England, and have to intercept some Ju88's before they bomb various radar stations and airfields.

While your other units go off and fight their own little battles, you're free to lock onto incoming units and shoot them up, so you either circle round an airfield, or had off over the channel to pounce on them in formation. Although this section suffers from the usual flight sim problem of very little happening for ages, most of these lags can be cut out by accelerating time, and there aren't any tiresome waypoints or navigation to faff around with, as you can simply choose a target and then select an automatic intercept mode.

Finally, there's the What if? section, which is undeniably the best bit of the game. You choose any of the twelve planes from the game (two from eah time period) and then can pick up to five enemies to dogfight against, so if you're a bit crap like me, you can go for five WW1 triplanes against my Spitifre, or if you're feeling hard, you can pit a 1950s Sabre against a couple of Harriers and a few Phantoms. The idea's that you can see how much better missiles are than cannons, how much better angled thrust is than propeller power and so on, but after a few goes several points become apparent.

For a start, vintage planes have many advantages over jets because of their tight turning circles, and many of them can't be locked onto by heat seeking missiles, and jets fly so fast that you tend to overshoot the older planes at colossal speeds. After a bit, I found the older planes to be the best fun, since you've only got cannons rather than all those flashy missiles, flares and things. Maybe this is just me though, since my fave sim is Knights Of The Sky, so perhaps other people will go for the fast-moving, high-tech stuff, and the great thing about this is that the option's there for trying both. I'm still not convinced that a Spitfire would be quite as good against a Mirage, or a Fokker Triplane as fearsome against a MiG 21F, as the game suggests, so maybe a bit more difference in handling and performance would have been a Good Thing.

To sum up, Dogfight's main appeal is the What If? section, and the other bits are there to increase the game life, which is no bad thing. The glare effect from the sun, the smoke trails from damaged planes and missiles are brilliant touches, and the modelling of the planes is wonderful. It does suffer from typical flight sim problems, such as distinguishing distant planes from your own cannon fire (as they're all represented by dots) and the AI of the enemy is so good that I found it virtually impossible to get an enemy on the screen for more than a few seconds when it would have been nice to creep up on a bomber and blast it from close range. It's a game, not a flight sim, but so what? It's good fun, but why isn't there a two-player link-up option, when the game's just gagging for it? You slipped up there, guys.

Uppers: Brilliantly modelled planes and all that dull navigation stuff. The What If? section's the real meat of the game, allowing frantic dogfight action, and I just lurrrve those smoke trails from damaged planes. They're fab.

Downers: The planes change from dots to close-up too quickly for you to appreciate the graphics properly, and there isn't enough difference in handling between the WW1 and modern planes.

It's good to see that MicroProse are building games onto their flight sim experience instead of just producing a stream of detailed simulations. Dogfight's an aeroplane shoot-'em-up, and while you can pick it up and start blasting away, there's enough sim in it to allow you to perfect your flying style and combat techniques.