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The relatively small Californian village of Fightertown is the unlikely home of the legendary Fighter Weapons School, otherwise known as 'Top Gun', where the top one percent of the US Navy's fighter pilots are trained to perfection. It's also the setting for Mirrorsoft's first 16-bit release on their Image Works label. Skychase is a flight simulation cum shoot-'em-up action game that puts either one or two players through the rigorous paces of being trained for real combat.

Of course it doesn't put you through the torturous written examinations that real pilots have to sit through. Instead it puts you straight into the cockpit of a modern jet fighter to do battle against either a computer 'drone' opponent or a friend in a series of dogfights, or 'hope' as the real pilots call them.

To enable two players to fight simultaneously, the screen display has been split vertically into two identical but independent cockpit screens. Player One uses the left-hand screen while Player Two (or the computer if one-player mode has been selected) views the game world from the screen on the right.

Bafore combat begins, the two fighter planes zoom past each other at high speed in a computer-controlled flyby sequence. Control is then handed over to the players and combat can begin in earnest. Rather than produce an accurate simulation of flying a fighter plane where dials and gauges abound as in Flight Simulator II or Jet, American programming team Maxis have opted for a more simplistic approach, so flying is just a matter of up-down-left-right controls, all performed with the joystick. The only keyboard control is the one used to increase and decrease thrust.

Defeating your enemy is not simply a matter of destroying him once. Instead, points are accumulated every time a dogfight is won. When either one of the player's fuel supplies is exhausted, the game ends. The player with the highest number of kills, and subsequently the most points, is declared the winner. Winning a dogfight round is achieved by shooting down your opponent using either your cannons or missiles. Cannons are operated by holding down the fire button, whereby a stream of machine gun bullets are fired. Alternatively, you can nail your opponent (or your opponent can nail you) by locking on a missile and firing. If you're in acceptable range, a targeting box appears which must then be lined up with your on-screen cursor. This takes a few seconds, and if you manage to do this, a steady high-pitched tone is sounded, whereupon a missile can be fired. Strangely enough, this missile comes in the shape of the ubiquitous red and white chequered Amiga ball!

A novel aspect of Skychase is the way in which it is practically a jet-combat construction set in that it's possible to alter just about every variable in the game. There is a choice of seven planes for each player to try out ranging from the F-14, F-16 and F-18 to the most up-to-date Soviet MiGs, and even a paper plane! It's possible to change the quantity of weaponry each plane carries, as well as their effectiveness in combat. A host of other features, such as blanking out the drone's screen in one player mode, so you can't see what he sees and the option to take out the CPU-controlled flyby sequence, have also been included.

Image Works have a few minor bugs to iron out, but this version is still well on course for its intended September release date. There won't be any horrendous differences, as the conversion was carried out by Maxis, the team behind the Amiga original. Update next month...

Skychase is by no means the fully-fledged flight simulation that it claims to be. The controls have been over-simplified, and as a result, the game veers too far to the arcade side to attract simulation fans. Also over-simplistic is the game's aesthetics. In the days of such an awesome computer as the Amiga, owners expect slightly more than blue green flat landscapes with just a wireframe grid for scenery. Sound is not quite as impressive as it could have been, and even leans on being dreary and depressing at times, due to the uninteresting (and ultimately unrealistic) engine sounds.

Also the theme tune is not suited to the game at all. A bit of high-speed rock would have been much more acceptable than the psuedo-classical tunette that currently adorns the title screen. However, Skychase succeeds in providing a good opening for people who are thinking about moving away from shoot-'em-ups to dabble in flight simulations. It's not too tough to put off first-timers, and so could serve ideally in introducting people to computer flight. It's also quite useful for brushing up on combat techniques and maneouvering, and some of the tricks that Skychase taught me later went on to be lifesavers in Interceptor! As a game however, it only really warrants its price tag if you have a friend or relative (or an Ad Manager) to play it with. The computer player lacks any real intelligence, even on the hardest level, and so playing Skychase in solitude is likely to end up being a rather mundane affair.