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If you've not seen the Spectrum version of Glider Rider, you could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of unpowered flight simulator. Not so. Ideas of soaring through the stratosphere, being at one with nature, only you and the birds, not even engine sound effects to make the windows vibrate, forget it.

Glider Rider, theme apart, is in fact an Ultimate/Firebird type 3D landscape game. In other words, the play area is composed of individual 3D landscapes in the fashion of games like Rasputin or Cylu or Fairlight or, well, there's a fair list of them.

I'll get back to the descriptive stuff; in the meantime, prepare for the hype. The inlay goes (this will probably sound better if you imagine it's Harrison Ford or Bogart). "You get a lot of time to think when you're gliding on the thermals. Mostly the feeling of flying like a bird makes them nice, thoughts, but everyone gets a little melancholy at times and this mission is enough to make anyone think hard."

Get the idea? Anyway, this geezer is a member of the 'Silent but deadly' squadron, a crack army unit (there's a joke in there somewhere if you look hard enough). His job is to penetrate the defences of an artificial islands, HQ of the Abraxas Corporation, purveyor of fine firearms to anyone with enough folding stuff to get well tooled up.

Our hero is equipped in true 007 style with a hang glider which turns into a microlight which turns into a motorbike. Transformers might have been a more appropriate title. You are deposited at a coastal site on your bike and from here you can scoot around the island from frame to frame, doing a bit of reconnaissance.

What you should be looking for are the unprotected nuclear reactors which provide the island's power. When you've found one it's time to soar into the heavens and drop hand grenades on it. As a matter of fact soaring into the air provided problems in itself. You have to find a slope, drive your bike down it at speed, then go into a quick U-turn. If you did that in real life you'd probably end up breaking every bone in your body, in make-believe land it turns your bike into a hang glider.

Being airborne is quite a laugh. You can fly out over the sea, (Don't go too low or the sharks will get you!). You also have to pick a fairly safe flight path or you'll be brought down to earth with a bump by the defence lasers, losing a lot of energy in the process.

The final objective is to destroy all the buildings and power plants (extra bomb caches can be found secreted in various places) then escape on the microlight and rendezvous with a waiting submarine.

Glider Rider has potential as an idea, but the game falls short for a number of reasons. The Spectrumesque graphics are difficult to make out, the landscape is very detailed, but lacks substance as does the character. While it's great fun to fly around, the experience is, at least initially, very short lived because you either land involuntarily or get shot down. It would definitely pay to map it out, but personally I didn't find the game inspiring enough to make the effort.