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This is a cockpit view shoot-em-up, featuring ground and air attacks which have very little to do with a flight simulator. The attacks are mostly directed at you and your base, and are spread over a huge map which has no rivers and some magical mountains that are always just on the horizon.

The first thing that struck me about the game was the time it took to load up, absolutely ages. Make cup of tea, read "The Hobbit", eat a four course meal and have your appendix out and it might just have finished loading.

At first I thought that this time dilation factor might just be my familiarity with disc drives, but a skim through the instructions (spoken in both Amstrad and Spectrum) revealed that you might have to flip the tape over during the game. It's a biggie!

While the loading was getting on with it, I tried to skim through the instructions for playing the thing. Although they are not that long, skimming through them is not easy. Unless, that is, you are one of those people who has the ability to read and digest Amstrad firmware manuals overnight. Putting it bluntly, this is one complicated game.

To illustrate how complicated it is, there are no less than ten training levels - blasting tanks only, planes only, alternate waves, both together, mini-invasion, full-blooded invasion and then the heavy stuff with different opening moves; like in the better games of chess which I can't play very well either. Right, helmet on, joystick ready, clear away remnants of four course meal and put jar containing appendix on top of the computer for a mascot, First select the easy level, pinpoint a hot-spot on the map, and launch at it. The auto pilot in this game can do quite a bit you know, and you can guide it by pointing at the map while in flight.

Now the tragic bit, the view out of your cockpit moves a chunk at a time. No flicker, but the view changes as infrequently and drastically as my tax code. I think this is because they are switching between two screens and altering the one you are not looking at.

The cockpit contains all the sort of information you would expect to find in an inter-galactic anti-tank/plane colony protection vessel. The number of missiles left, your current position and where the enemy are are all on display somewhere. A crib sheet supplied with the game helps you find the right dial if you get lost.

The tanks and planes look pretty much like moderately chunky tanks and planes, all done in what looks like mode 1, or at least with only three colours in it. Small mistook here, the distructions say that the shield power remaining is in red. Either I am red/blue colourblind or it's in blue. The sound effects are pretty much what you have come to expect by now, and you only notice them when some anti-noise pollution lobbyist in the family comes along and turns them off.

The gunsights are non-existent, and you just have to follow the shots to their vanishing point and put your target somewhere on that line. The radar scope does give a choice of top and side views with a range readout though, which almost makes up for the lack of decent sights.

The controls seem to be a bit sluggish and not very well de-bounced, This may just be an illusion caused by the slow screen update, but you frequently end up turning a missile off again just after arming it.

Only the one bug in the game spotted so far; you can blast down all the planes in a training level and sometimes the game won't end or give you any more planes to shoot at. No other bugs yet, but t hat might have something with me not lasting very well on the higher levels.

The best way of dealing with the tanks was to fly at them at high speed with the aid of the afterburners. ("Look at that go, Mummy Bird". "You'd shift that fast if your tail was on fire son".) When they start to look like tanks, you cut the engines completely and hover. The tanks are then at just the right distance for you to blow them to the scrapyard but for you to still be safely out of range. Buzzing them just wastes your ammo.

Planes are much harder and need much chasing about before you can blow them out of the sky. People shouting at you: "It won't go any faster if you bend the joystick", don't help much either.

The higher levels of play definitely require a bit of strategy to complement the joystick wiggling. If only the screen update had been smoother and you could really control the guided missiles, this would have been a super game.