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Even with all your F16s and Falcons or Interceptors, to my mind, there's been no flight simulator that's even come close to Gunship. Less reliant on having dozens of attractive graphics and lots of exterior views, and more reliant on having realistic action, Gunship on the C64 has much more in the way of atmosphere and excitement than any Amiga flight sims to date. Until now.

Gunship is now available, after months of waiting, even after ST and PC versions were released, on the Amiga. At last owners of Mr. Commodore's 16-bit dream machine have the chance to take an AH-64 Apache up for a spin over five different war zones and through an infinite amount of missions.

The world outside your copter is viewed in first person perspective, as usual, and that's how it stays. There are no outside views, there are no missile-eye views. There are no zoom facilities. There isn't even a chase plane option. But that's a much more sensible way to generate atmosphere. It's a bit hard to believe in a flight simulator if you are poncing around outside your plane, zooming in and out, not really flying. In Gunship, you are restricted to three views: look forward, look left and right, and that's the way it should be. After all there aren't external views on a real chopper, are there?

This flight sim's fun. The controls are a little sluggish, but I get the feeling that's how they're supposed to handle; after all, this is a low-level combat chopper, not a Fiat Uno.

The graphics are great. The clever use of shading mixed with filled vectors gives the game a very solid feel, especially where the enemy craft are concerned. Tanks look like tanks, AA guns look like real AA guns, small frightened people look like real frightened people.

The design of the game is identical in every detail to the C64 version, right down to the loading sequence. The missions follow along the same lines, the five areas you fly over are identical. What you have here is the same brilliant game, but adapted to suit an Amiga, with better sound, graphics and playability. So who can complain?