US Gold
£10.99/£15.99

It's one of those storylines: lots of guns, blood and violence - just the way we all like them! You've broken through the enemy lines into a high security camp and stolen the enemy's secret weapon - the Rapier machine gun, developed by Middle Eastern terrorists. Getting in was easy, but you have to get out again and back to your base, crossing the Line Of Fire.

Your escape takes place in different vehicles across many treacherous terrains: a high-speed powerboat. a jeep. an aircraft and a helicopter must be manoeuvered through jungle, desert and white water rapids before you reach your destination. Of course you're able to blast away the enemies you encounter with your new toy, the Rapier machine gun. It has a normal bullet-firing mode plus a special grenade launcher to give the terrorists a taste of their own medicine.

All the action takes place over eight levels. Some scrolling away from you, some towards you and some from left to right across the screen. Immediate thoughts of Operation Thunderbolt spring to mind, but the variety in the enemies and movement soon dispels that.

Graphically Line Of Fire is good: the backgrounds and sprites are well drawn and the 3-D effect on some levels works well until a sprite comes up close and becomes all blocky. The levels that scroll horizontally let the game down. The scrolling is very jerky and the high detail scenery makes targets very difficult to see. Your energy soon gets depleted, but Red Cross parcels can be shot to increase it and you can collect bombs to fill up the grenade launcher.

The scrolling of the scenery is automatic - you can't choose a route, but just blast at everything you see! if you had control you could inch forward and take out the enemies as you go: as it is you end up missing most of them as they go crashing into you. Line Of Fire's action is 100% shoot-'em-up. I found the action slightly repetitive because there's no brainwork involved at all. But for those of you with an incredibly itchy trigger finger Line of Fire provides the thrills!

NICK [72%]

The Operation Wolf-style shoot-'em-up has been with us for a long while: some attempts have been very good with others less than impressive. Line Of Fire sadly falls nearer the latter description. The game is playable but the graphics are disappointing. The sprites are monochrome and spotting a terrorist is not an easy job. Scrolling is also a little on the jerky side, but the action is certainly hot and fast! Also, and this is a little odd, the super machine gun never runs out of bullets! You may think this is an advantage but I missed the excitement of running out of ammo and panicking to collect some more! Still, you do have to keep an eye out for collectable bombs because it's these, in the rocket launcher, that do the most damage: extra lives can be picked up too. For a conversion of a non-stop blasting coin-op Line of Fire is OK, but the arcade game relied on its stunning graphics to make it a hit - strip those away and the game you're left with is last fun but overall interest isn't very long-lasting.
MARK [68%]

US Gold
£10.99 cass/£15.99 disk
Reviewer: Linda Barker

Oh dear. Line Of Fire seems to be rather topical, doesn't it? It's all about loads of soldiers in a desert running about shooting each other, you see. (Let's hope reality doesn't get any closer to what we see here than it has already, eh?)

Ahem. But anyway, the game. As you've probably guessed from the screenshots, it's a shoot-'em-up along the popular lines of Operations Wolf and Thunderbolt. In fact, it's the only Op Wolf clone being touted this year, which more or less guarantees it a fair slice of the action - the only thing it's really got to do is convince us that it's not something we've all seen a million times before (though, of course, it is).

Just like its Op predecessors, Line Of Fire is a sort of shooting gallery affair (as if you didn't know already). Various objects including soldiers, helicopters and speedboats come hurtling towards you firing missiles and dropping bombs and it's your job to shower them back with bullets, using a little gunsight thingie that you move around the screen.

(Actually, I start to get a bit worried about myself when I play these sorts of games, because though I'm a peace-loving soul most of the time - it doesn't take much to get me yelling "Kill! Kill! Kill!" and thinking about joining the army. Yikes!)

But anyway, back to the game. So far it all sounds pretty identical to Thunderbolt, doesn't it? Yup, pretty much the same comin'-at-ya action, and with a two-player option as well. But what about the 'big twist'? The 'hook' that's going to make us all want to rush out and buy it? Well (wait for it) in Line Of Fire you can actually move around corners too! One minute you're zooming along a corridor, shooting at soldiers, when suddenly you come to the end and whammo! Everything twists around 90 and you zoom off down the next corridor. It's enough to make you feel jolly giddy, I'll tell you.

There are eight levels, all of which sound fairly varied but don't let that kid you. You start off in an enemy base, with loads of 'orrible foreigners charging at you, and then move on in the second level to another enemy base, this time yellow and stuck in a jungle. Here you get to blow up jeeps and helicopters, as well as collect lots of little boxes (as you do on all the levels). The ones marked with a cross are first aid boxes (sorry if I'm insulting your intelligence here), the others are ammo or what have you.

Onto Level Three then, and it's an escape by high-speed boat, with lots of enemy boats to destroy. Here your ammo and medicine boxes are perched on top of bridges and all goes fairly swimmingly until the end, when something very odd appears. I'm not quite sure what it is - it's a sort of big grey lump, with lots of knobbles and guns and, yes, I think I can make out some gunmen there too. It looks like a wall floating in the middle of the river, but I guess it's really a sort of two-tier bridge, with little baddies hiding between the arches.

And that's one of the main problems with the game really - you couldn't really call Line Of Fire pretty (everything's in monochrome with the levels in different colours) and you certainly couldn't call it clear. I mean there you are, merrily blasting the Christmas stuffing out of everyone when giddy aunts! What's that?! A boat? A helicopter? A something else? I don't blooming know. (Ahem. Perhaps I'm exaggerating here a bit but you get the general idea, and it's certainly not helped by things being a bit jerky at times.)

But anyway, back to the plot. We've also got some fighting in a canyon, a ruined city bit (which scrolls sideways), a bit set in a tunnel (where you seem to encounter a bloke in tight leather trousers suspended in a cage affair and surrounded by hooks and chains - very strange), an aeroplane bit and, ooh, much (much) more. But for all this supposed variety the action's pretty much the same throughout.

The basic trouble - and I guess it's the same with all these sorts of games is that it's all just a load of killing (and then a bit more killing after that). The scrolling-round-corners effect - the selling point to make it different from the Ops - isn't a big enough twist to keep you interested and it just ends up being too old hat to be very exciting. For die-hard shooting gallery fans only.

(Hmm. The thrill of blowing things up seems to have worn off - maybe I won't be joining the army after all. Besides, there's all that horrible food to consider too.)

Label: US Gold
Price: £9.99 48K/128K
Reviewer: Matt Regan

Don't you hate it when people go out of their way to ruin your day? Well, in Line Of Fire, the mysteriously named Enemy have developed a new type of machine gun that's given them the upper hand in the ongoing war. So to counter this, the good guys have sent two top commandos to nab the Uzi-style fashion accessory. escape with it, and mow down anyone silly enough to stand in their way. Just a Sunday jaunt to MacDonalds for these hard lads really.

The game starts at the point when the two heroes, Red and Blue (did their mums really name them that?), have grabbed the prototype gun and are trying to fight their way out of the enemy complex. Needless to say, the Enemies aren't too pleased with this invasion of their privacy, and are determined to kill the commandos before they escape. So the chums travel through the corridors, using their gunsights to shoot the foes. before their lifemeters expire - meaning death and failure.

Luckily there are bonus items to be shot that give Red and Blue increased health, better weapons, and even rocket bombs for mass destruction and slaughter. Every so often a boss or two appears, needing many more shots to kill. Once out of the budding, there are sections on boats (where the baddies zoom in on inflatable dinghies); and also there's a level set in a town, with helicopters, jeeps and foot soldiers trying to gun the boys down.

Line Of Fire is a direct clone of Operation Wolf and Thunderbolt, but is a great game nonetheless. The only problem is that the sights move not quite fast enough for me. But then I was always an impatient child. Still, Line of Fire adds a new perspective to a tried and tested formula and shells out lots of death-dealing fun for all the family!

US Gold
Spectrum £10.99, Amiga £24.99

Sergeant Red and Major Blue are two hardened commandos with loads of successful operations under their belts. It seems that when a job requiring indiscriminate carnage on a massive scale comes along, these two are the men for the job. Which is just as well really, as "the enemy" have created a new type of machine gun that is worrying a lot of people in high places. Two men are needed to travel behind enemy lines, pinch a couple of these machine guns and head back to friendly shores. Guess who gets the job?

With Line of Fire, the player and an optional pal actually become Red and Blue just after they've pinched the advanced machine guns, and they have to use them to protect themselves during the dangerous return journey. Eight stages of mass destruction and general target practice await any mercenaries who dare take on the enemy.

Our heroes travel through many different terrains on the road to freedom. They may hop onto the back of a jeep and blast a way through the jungle where they'll be accosted by foot soldiers, planes, helicopters and generally anything that the guerrilla menace can throw at you. As your trusty vehicle careers through the jungle it'll have to occasionally change direction (no roads, y'see) and the 3D landscape rotates around the player accordingly.

Other stages include braving a treacherous river where the guerrillas' marine contingent attempt to wipe you out, and an airborne section as our heroes fly to freedom!

Sometimes the going just gets too tough, so it's a good thing that your new machine guns have a special rocket bomb attachment that destroys everything on screen in a blaze of napalm! They'll need it though, as the guerrilla menace have guarded the end of each level with a huge guardians of enormous destructive potential!