This year looks as if it's going to be a good one for all you flight sims out there. But it's about time we had something a bit different instead of just changing the plane you fly. Oh look! Domark have obliged with the release of Harrier Assault.
Not your average easy-to-fly planes, these Harrier things - it's like trying the balacne yourself on top of two very big fans, only harder. But more of that later. I'd better tell you why you're to fly this overgrown extractor fan.

Take most flight games and you'll find that the only job you have to do is complete pre-set missions while flying a high powered jet, but it's different in Harrier Assault. Here the concept is extended because you get to play two roles.
The first role is as Commander of the Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) in which you run the campaign of Operation Ocean Saber. Operation Ocean Saber is a UN-authorised invasion of East Timor in Southeast Asia. In the job you are tasked with landing US Marines in hostile terrain and making strategic and tactical decisions for the force as a whole.

The second role is as a squadron pilot, in which you fly the AV-88 Harrier jump jet (surprise, surprise) from the flight deck of the USS Tarawa and take it into combat against the armed forces of Indonesia, the nation which has seized East Timor.

As you can see, it's just slightly different from other flight sims, but hey if you're a traditionalist you can simply fly the Harrier and let the computer make those all-important tactical and strategic decisions for you. As mentioned above, the game is set in and around East Timor in Southeast Asia and I can't ever remember a flight sim set in that country, so you can't fault Domark for not being different from the rest.

As far back as I can remember I actually think this is the first proper flight sim featuring the Harrier Jump Jet. I think most software companies tended to ignore it, maybe because it's very hard hard to, err, simulate. But why is it so hard to simulate? I hear you all cry. Well, it's because the Harrier is a VTOL fighter aircraft. As you probably already know, VTOL stands for Vertical Take Off and Landing and it means that the jet can take off and land, err, vertically. Hey, you just learn something old from people who shouldn't witter on so much every day.

The AV-88 Harrier is not the sort of plane you want to meet on a dark night. It can be tooled up to the teeth with five types of ordnance ranging from guided missiles to your bog standard unguided rockets to high-tech laser-guided bombs, plus it's got a couple of awesome 25mm cannons bolted on the front We are talking total destruction here, kids.

I'll let you in on a little secret, but only if you don't tell anyone. Most flight sims claim that they are accurate down to the tiniest detail, but they are not that accurate in the control department.
Planes as a general rule are a right pain in the botty to fly - ask anyone who's been on the Krypton Factor. To combat this fact, most programmers make flight that bit easier, but this is not the case with Harrier Assault. The flight model is very realistic indeed so if you want a challenge, you've got one.

Harrier is very good fun once you get into it but I think that it is fair to warn 500 owners that it's deadly slow unless you have an accelerator.

The Amiga A1200 is a brilliant idea. We can still have lots of fun playing Amiga A500 games, just like in the good old days - the A500's a great machine, after all, capable of great things. But now, for the lucky few, those games can take advantage of the A1200's extra speed and graphical trickery to kick in new features, better visuals and slicker gameplay. And on top of that, A500 owners would be unlikely to begrudge A1200-owners the odd A1200-only game, ding things the old A500 could only dream of. Yup, everyone's happy. Isn't progress a wonderful thing? (Er, I think you'd better have a go on AV-8B Harrier Assault. Ed)

The Amiga A1200 is a brilliant idea. In the old days, if you'd just spent ages writing a game only to find that, whether through over-ambition, carelessness or sheer incompetence, it ran at too slow a speed to be playable, you'd have to either improve it till it worked properly or go back to the drawing board. Now you can just stick a label saying 'Amiga 1200 recommended' on the box and go and see what's on telly.

The first time I loaded up AV-8B Harrier Assault on my trusty A500, I wondered whether there was something wrong with the old machine. Polgyons were juddering across the screen at an appallingly slow rate. Lines were lurching past my eyes as if the world was about to end. The keyboard was deliberating for whole seconds at a time before answering my requests. And all this despite the absence of anything on the screen except the sky, my AV-8B Harrier, a pyramid shaped mountain and a squiggly line that I think was meant to be a road.

I panicked. What could be wrong? Perhaps my power supply was failing - it wouldn't be the first time. Perhaps my RAM expansion had come adrift. Perhaps my Agnus (or whatever it's called) was about to breathe its last. But, before placing the whole sorry mess into the hands of a qualified technician, I decided to run a quick test. A copy of F-19 Stealth Fighter fell conveniently to hand. I loaded it up and... phew. Normality was restored. An aircraft carrier steamed majestically past beneath the moon-lit sky. Whole cities glided effortlessly across the screen. Everything was going to be all right.

It seems that AV-8B Harrier Assault can effectively be considered an A1200-only game, and, except for a token blue The Bottom Line box at the end, the rest of this review is aimed solely at A1200 owners. The A500-owning majority will just have to go away. Sorry.

The first thing that'll strike you about AV-8B Harrier Assault is how dull the graphics are. From the moment you take off from your rather nondescript, shoe box-shaped aircraft carrier, to your lengthy journey over the dark blue rectangle that is the sea, to your first combat engagement with a collection of indistinct lines and squares, the over-riding feeling is one of Spectrum circa 1983. In fact, the only really nice-looking graphic in the hole game (that I've encountered at least) is your Harrier, which looks really Harrier-like.

Sure, everything moves smoothly enough, but so it should running on a 32-bit machine. The A1200 should be capable of throwing ridiculous numbers of polygons around the screen, and maybe texturing and light-source shading them too. AV-8B Harrier Assault doesn't even try.

Continuing on this negative note, there are loads of niggly irritations too which, in the light of all this blandness, are all the more difficult to ignore. The first is the front-end through which you've got to wade before you can take to the skies. It's one of those really annoying ones consisting of screens that are meant to represent parts of the aircraft carrier.

To plan a mission you click on a picture of a monitor with a funny-shaped blob on it (of course!), to arm your plane you click on the telephone (it's obvious!), that sort of thing. Only you haven't got a clue what all these wretched pictures mean until you've checked in the manual, a process made all the more arduous by the fact that there are no illustrations in there (except a couple of photos of Harriers).

There are other annoying bits, too, like the way the game keeps asking you to insert disks it already got, and the controls for the direction of your jet nozzles (you've got to take your hands off the joystick, hold Shift and press one of keys 1-0 - no simple matter in the heat of a battle). There's no 'turn off the crash detection' option - a must when you're learning to fly a plane as fiddly as the Harrier. The effect of trying to use the rudder controls is hilarious. You're supposed to get a debriefing when you land, telling you how you got on, but it wouldn't give me one. And the music at the beginning is terrible - Holst courtesy of the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ.

AV-8B Harrier Assault gets a reasonably high score, though, because it is actually a pretty good simulation of the AV-8B Harrier. (At least, I'm prepared to believe it is). Once you've managed to suppress that horrible feeling that you've just handled over £400 for a new machine so you can play worse games than you did on your old Amiga, it's actually rather good fun. It's not a game you can enjoy playing just for the sake of it - you won't find yourself just flying,seeing where the sky takes you - but if you're prepared to stick to the rule book and follow through the missions it's pretty rewarding. There's a stronger than usual strategy side, too. (Though many people might prefer that sentence to be moved to the end of the previous paragraph).

It's a simulation for simulation buffs, then, much like the MiG-29 games which Simis were also behind. It takes a lot of getting into, and is really quite absorbing once you do. But it could have been so, so much better.