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Practise those David Niven impressions - keep that upper lip stiff and get those kites airborne in this simulation of the Battle of Britain

War is undoubtedly a thoroughly unpleasant thing, but swooping around machine gunning things in a simulation of aerial combat is great fun - strange but true.

Reach For The Skies puts you right in the thick of it. It's a comprehensive recreation of the Battle of Britain, where the Luftwaffe tried to subdue the Royal Air Force before the invasion of Britain could begin. You can play the pilots or controllers of either side. The pilots get three lives to make it through the war and the controllers have to maintain or destroy the British fighter force, depending on which side they're on.

It's a game you need to approach in a determined manner, there's a respectably fat manual to read and a card showing the mass of keyboard controls you need to master. You need at least 1MByte of memory to run Reach For The Skies and having a hard drive or two disk drives helps a lot.

After having decided which side you're on, it's time to give yourself a name and pick which phase of the battle you want to start in. The later you start, the higher your rank and the more realistic the game. You are briefed on a mission and off you go swooshing about, hunting down the enemy and blasting away while you try to stay out of the drink. You can opt to miss out the take off and landings and stick to the punch-ups which is a blessing if you're not terribly patient.

Although there are lots of controls to remember, flying about is easier than you'd expect. You control your kite with either keyboard, joystick or mouse and there isn't masses of technology to get bogged down in. Apart from firing the guns and adjusting the throttle there's almost nothing else to do when you're airborne other than concentrate on flying. The flight envelope and performances of the planes are supposedly realistic.

If you start at the beginning of the battle, the balance is swung in your favour. As a British pilot, you get Hurricanes and Spitfires, while the Germans get to fly Bf 109 and Bf110 fighters, He111, DO17 and Ju88 bombers and the infamous Stuka dive bomber.

Apart from looking straight ahead, there are seven other views from your fighter cockpit. You need to keep switching to these to keep track of the other planes around you. Swirling around in three dimensions can all too easily leave you lost and easy meat for a fighter swooping from the sun and blasting you to bits while you are trying to get your bearings. Successful dogfighting takes practice. During the fight you get radio traffic appearing as text at the top of the screen. Your controller directs you towards enemies and your fellow pilots impart useful information like the fact that there is a bandit on your tail about to do nasty things to you.

If you're not too careful you spend ages chasing little dots on the horizon only to catch up with them, overshoot wildly and end up getting shot to bits. You need to develop tactics - at the very least take your time and circle around and try to get above the enemy. The dogfights can get huge too, with up to a dozen planes fighting for position.

The job of controller sees you deciding which planes go where and attack what. You ponder over a map of south-east Britain directing the chaps before taking part in the battle yourself as any one of the pilots. The Luftwaffe controller needs to pick his targets and concentrate on getting the bombers through. The RAF controller needs to distribute his forces and get his boys past the defending fighters and in among the bombers.

At the end of each day the state of the British fighter force is calculated. If it falls below a half of the initial strength, the Luftwaffe wins. Targets for the Luftwaffe include radar installations, convoys that are bringing supplies and aircraft factories as well as the airfields themselves.

The 3D vector graphics are good, the ground detail is particularly stunning. The sound effects and the music are a step above the usual flight sim. There's even snatches of digitised speech which really adds to the atmosphere. The general feel of the game is excellent and the amount of background detail and realism is impressive.

There's no doubt that Reach For The Skies is a superb game. It's aiming for realism and a lot of work has obviously gone into trying to achieve this effect. It can occasionally crash when running from a hard drive, which is annoying, and combat can get a trifle tedious as you manoeuvre about for the best position and spend more time flying to the targets than in combat with them.

Sometimes you also wish the planes didn't fly quite so realistically - especially when you overshoot an easy target. However, with practice you soon feel involved in the dogfights and learn to play as part of a squadron rather than a lone pilot determined to engage every enemy plane in the sky single-handedly. With the option to play both sides and the controller it should keep you going for a while. Being a front line pilot in one of the most vital aerial wars ever fought is no job for the faint-hearted; you need a stuff upper lip and plenty of hot mugs of tea but it's a whizzo wheeze, pip pip.

Bags of atmosphere giving a sense of involvement in battles. Historically realistic.

Dogfights can be quick and confusing. A lot to get a handle on before it shines.