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Hot on the heels of Highway Encounter, the last release from Vortex, comes TLL. This consists of a semi-3D view of a landscape filled with trees, houses, lakes and the like. You control a tornado fighter on a bombing sortie, the aim being to drop bombs on strategically placed targets shown as a small circle on the map. As your plane flies across the landscape the background scrolls in all four directions allowing you to move this scrolling window over the much larger map.

One great feature is the shadow of the aircraft that is cast on the ground. As you fly over a building the shadow is seen to go up the side then across the roof in a very lifelike fashion. This is quite important, as it allows your height to be judged.

Once the target has been located you must go down low both to be sure of hitting the target and also so that your speed drops to a manageable level. If you pull back on the joystick the aircraft gains height and speed until it is flying supersonically and the swing wings are pulled in. When you are flying fast you have to be very careful where you choose to push the joystick forward to slow down for the sudden loss of height will probably leave you splattered up the side of one of the buildings.

Left and right movement of the joystick causes the plane to bank and hence turn in 45 degree steps giving the eight possible directions for flight. Pushing the M key shows a mode one status screen which includes a complete map.

Graphically the game is quite brilliant and its concept is reasonably novel. Technically it is a masterpiece. The speed at which the 16k of screen memory is scrolled about, especially in supersonic flight, is quite outstanding.

I don't doubt that you can probably learnt to become pretty good at controlling the fighter, but for the first time user it doesn't exactly instil confidence when you can get through your three jets faster than you can say Super Standard.