Games reviewers, by and large, hate flight sims. Loathe them. Dislike them with the sort of sneery disgust normally reserved for war games and people who buy Genesis records. Why? Mainly because you can't just pick up and play the things, you have to (ulp!) read the manual.

Most people like to have a few goes on a game before bothering to check the old printed matter. Sadly, in most flight sims you can't even take off without referring to the manual. The manual that comes with Falcon is so hefty (160 pages) that you wouldn't want to drop it on your hamster. Or read more than a small percentage of it at a time, for that matter.

Then there's the number of controls you need to use. In the Falcon cockpit there are 50-ish different buttons you can press, so virtually every key on the keyboard will be needed at some point. It's best to forget about using a joystick (what's the point when you'd need the keyboard for the other 45 functions anyway?).

All of this could add up to the sort of game that the uncommitted flyer would struggle to get to grips with, as is the case with many flight sims of this depth. Fortunately, Spectrum HoloByte had all this in mind when they designed the game.

When playing at First Lieutenant (easy) level, nobody shoots at you, and even if you plough into the ground or hurtle into a building at full speed, you don't crash - you simply land on the ground and can then take off again no probs. Tsch, easy.

The main problem with Falcon is that there's no much going on. There are not enough handling problems on the lower skill levels to give it any real essence de flight sim. And as a shoot-'em-up it's sadly lacking in things to shoot up, with only two enemy planes per mission in most cases.

Having said that, the size of the manual is testament to how deep (and complicated and difficult) the game gets on the higher skill levels. Most people will need to run through everything on the easiest level first though, and once you've completed a mission, there's a lot less impetus to try that mission again.

Never mind. Once you've beaten (or got bored of) the twelve missions supplied, there are a couple of mission disks available at £9.99 each. The first, Operation: Counterstrike, includes major advancements on the original game, including four different moving enemy ground vehicles (tanks and the like). This helps spice things up no end, especially since all the missions involve destroying ground targets. In direct contravention of the Amiga Power tradition of marking mission disks, it gets 82 on the percentometer.

The other mission disk, Operation: Firefight, is an altogether sadder state of affairs. There are lots of new types of missile and some nice Hind helicopters flying around. The missions are a load of hamster feed though, the objective of over half of them being something along the brilliant lines of "Destroy one MiG-27". While Counterstrike seemed a genuine progression from the original, this one just shouts out (in an American accent), "dull and half-hearted attempt to cash in, get your dull and half-hearted attempt to cash in here. Ugh, 53 perent.

Well, the main Falcon game's five years old and yet looks as polished as many 1992 flight sims. Plenty of functions and a nice easy first skill level, but a bit more in the way of action wouldn't have gone amiss.