US Gold
£10.99

The year is 1997 and the worldwide drugs problem has escalated out of all proportion. The newly appointed US President attempts to push Congress into declaring war on the South American drug lords. Unfortunately Congress refuses but the President decides to send the troops in anyway.

There is one secret weapon the Americans have to defeat the drug barons with - the state of the art F14-LCB Cosmos Rapier. This aircraft can destroy all the drug installations and the transportation routes in one swoop, and you're the chief pilot!

Before starting a game you have a few selections to make: after entering your name and codename you get to choose the co-pilot. Each one can be reviewed on screen, along with a picture and their flying record. The skill level and weather conditions also have to be selected. Once all this is done you can get on to the missions. You get the choice between five carrier and five land based missions. One is a training option and the rest drugs busting.

Controlling the Rapier is pretty similar to other flight simulations - directional control with the joystick or keyboard and you have special function keys to perform the other aircraft duties, such as lifting the undercarriage or releasing the air brakes. It can be a bit complicated, so a training mission is a must.

Four types of enemy plane must to be blown out of the sky. The weapons available for the job include a machine gun cannon and two types of missile.

Don't be fooled by the title, Snowstrike is nothing at all to do with snowball fights! What the game boils down to is a basic flight simulation. You take off from a carrier or a land base and fly around looking for planes to shoot and drugs installations to blow up. The main screen display shows the control panel with all the knobs and dials and a forward view through the cockpit. You can also check what's attacking you from the rear. The landscapes you fly over are lacking in detail: most of the time all you'll see is cyan shading and the odd cloud whizzing past, though drug targets are well drawn when you find them.

I found carrying out the missions really enjoyable, especially having read the instructions and knowing what keys to press! Flight simulations have never been a roaring success on the Spectrum but Snowstrike is a really good effort.

NICK [68%]

Snowstrike is one of the most playable flight sims around - you can just start the engines and take off. In the air your computerised navigator's help is essential because he often warns you of incoming missiles, aircraft etc (although dodging them is another issue). Watching all the dials and meters is a tough job and for the first few missions I found myself dive bombing into the landscape! I'd have preferred a wider range of weapons and mission targets, but despite its limitations Snow Strike is surprisingly enjoyable.
MARK [70%]

US Gold
£10.99 cass
Reviewer: Matt Bielby

Now this is an odd one. It's not a flight sim, not really (though it has a great deal in common with one), and its not exactly a shoot-'em-up (the controls are far too complicated, and there's not really enough around to shoot at most of the time). I guess its a bit of an in-betweeny really, which makes for a rather strange game. Luckily though, it's also rather fun (for a while).

The scenario is some dodgy old thing about military strikes on Columbian drug barons. Your plane is apparently some soopa-doopa brand-newie, though from the loading screen it looks exactly like an ordinary old F-14 Tomcat. There are ten missions, half land-based and half carrier-based, blessed with such intriguing titles as 'Demolish drug warehouse' and 'Sink enemy aircraft carrier'. They follow more or less the same pattern - take off (easy), fly about a bit (hopefully in the direction of your target), fight some enemy Migs (which come in different varieties, but all look the same), identify the target, blow it up, get shot down (optional), fly home and land safely (one of the trickiest bits of the game).

There's quite a bit of other stuff in here though which gives it all more depth. First there's the front end - after you've picked your nickname (I chose Sexy) you still have to get yourself a co-pilot (some are polite and informative, some a bit stroppy) and the weather conditions you fancy.

Then there are the in-game options and information screens. There's the control-room-back-at-base screen - you move the flight-deck officer's hands over his control panel to call up weather status, global status (strategic info like the positions of friendly and enemy bases) and combat status (your performance so far, how many missiles you've used and so on). There's also a special control screen you get when you eject from your plane which helps you float down safely to within pick-upable distance of your home base. And there's a pilot records screen (telling of past mission accomplishments and giving points for everything from time efficiency to safety record), and probably a couple of others I forgot. It all gives a bit of depth and atmosphere to what, in the flying sequences, is rather a simple game.

So what of the actual flying itself, eh? Well, taking off is easy enough but then it gets really weird. The graphics do your head in for a start - half are really nice and fast-moving 3D vector stuff (things like the aircraft carriers, the ground-based targets and the like), while the rest is full of not-particularly-impressive monochrome sprites. The clouds are all sprites for instance, as are the enemy planes (which can only be seen head-on, making the dogfights a bizarre combination of real flight sim stuff and Op Wolf style shoot-'em-up). It really is most peculiar.

Ah, yes. The dogfights. There's none of your heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles here, matey - it's simply a case of selecting the weapon you want (either air-to-air missile or a very satisfying cannon), swinging your plane round so you're hopefully facing the enemy, locking the gun (or missile) on and banging away. There're chaff and flares to confuse incomings too, and you might want to keep an eye on the central radar screen to make sure there's nothing behind you. But that's about it. Taking out land- or sea-based targets is a similar affair - select a different sort of missile (an air-to-surface one), line up your target (easier since it isn't swinging about so much) and fire - they need more hits and blow themselves up a bit better (3D, y'see) but that s about it. This is stuff that'd make you go all wibbly if you'd never played a flight sim and were just getting bored of ordinary shoot-'em-ups, though for the rest of us it carries a bit of a "So what?" stigma about it.

Everything in Snow Strike seems to have been put together rather well, it's more the overall concept of the game that's at fault. And US Gold, who develop and market 8-bit versions of Epyx games over here, don't seem all that sure what to make of it either - they're insistent it isn't a flight sim, and rightly so, but haven't figured out quite what to call it instead. With Christmas looming, it now looks as if it'll get lost in the rush of titles, which is a shame, because certain aspects (like the speedy 3D graphics) are very good indeed.

Snow Strike will probably win its fans - I just don I know who they'll be.

Label: US Gold
Price: £9.99
Reviewer: Gary 'Mouth' Whitta

These Columbian drug barons are boys, eh? And if there's anybody who deserves a good firm slap on the wrist in this day and age, it's these moustache-twiddling masters of the evil white powder that's corrupting the modern world. Anyone who's seen Miami Vice or Grange Hill will know precisely how serious the problem is. So, how do we put a stop to this terrible trade? Tougher customs control? Nah. More effective anti-drugs education? Nah. How about taking off in an F-14 Multi-Role Jet Fighter and giving Manuel Sanchez Domingo and all his powder-peddling pals a proper kicking? Yeah!

In Snowstrike you're the fortunate pilot of a state-of-the-art F14, and get to go out and drop bombs on these Hispanic Hitlers - and that's basically the rather lame excuse for yet another slice of combat flight simulation action a la Strike Force Harrier, Fighter Bomber and, er... several other flight simulations.

Ten missions await you, all with a suitable drug-busting flavour. Bombing cocaine refineries, demolishing drug warehouses, terminating drug transports end sinking enemy aircraft carriers (because we all know that these drug lords use aircraft carriers all the time) all go towards halting the granular menace and earning you some juicy medals and commendations along the way. All you have to do is find the target, get a positive ID on it, and then blow some very big holes in it until it is no more. Then it's back to the airstrip or aircraft carrier from whence you came for a mutton tikka, a cold beer and start preparing for your next trip.

Along the way you'll come up against some marauding MiGs that need to be blown away, else they become a pain in the nether regions and may even shoot you out of the sky! But by clever use of the Control Room back at base (where you slide a bloke's finger about any push buttons to get information), you can pick the most convenient route to your target and thus avoid any unnecessary aggravation.

Anyway, that's about the long and the short of it. Despite its potential, Snowstrike falls short on action. There's not a great deal to do, and even less to see due to the blandness of the graphics. I spent hours flying about looking for drug fields, and all I found were these blank dark rectangles in the ground. It wasn't until I resorted to reading the manual that I found that those rectangles WERE the drug fields! Hardly instinctive gameplay is it? If it wasn't for the annoyingly repetitive graphics, Snowstrike might have been a bit more involving - as it is, it's so average not even the good ol' Nunkie Sam Versus The Bad Guys can save it. Zzzzzzzzzz....