 | Harrier Attack. The Harrier Jumpjet. I�m an aircraft buff, and the thought of hooking through the skies in one of these things sounded promising, especially since they are the only aircraft in the world that can fly at 80mph � IN REVERSE! |  |
 | The initial loading screen, considering it�s from 1982, looked promising, a couple of harriers flying out of the screen. Loading finishes, and the only prompt we have is to select a level: 1-5. OK, we hit �1� and away we go. The game doesn�t live up to my initial images though. It�s a side scrolling� sorry, 'side jerking' shoot-em-up. It�s possible to control speed and altitude, as well as shooting, and dropping bombs. |  |
 | Once you take off from your carrier, your mission is simply to fly through the level, destroying anything that gets in your way, then landing on your carrier again at the end. Enemies consist of a couple of ships that will fire a missile at you, which is easy enough to avoid, the occasional enemy fighter, and lots of harmless tanks, radar installations and AA guns. The latter do scatter flak around the place, but it turns out this is harmless to fly through, although it will stop any bombs you drop. |  |
 | Now, this sounds easy, as there�s only ships and jets, which are pretty rare, which can harm you. How about if I mention limited rockets, bombs and fuel? I ran out of bombs pretty quickly, so it�s fairly important to get decent at aiming these. Fuel seems to be used at a constant rate, regardless of speed � you will not get through a level at lowest speed, you�re gonna hafta speed up sometime, which makes it harder to hit targets. Bugger huh? |  |
 | More wasted bombs. No bombs left, so to bump up my score, I need to hug the terrain and use my front firing rockets instead. Problem is that these follow your jet. You fire and fly up, rocket follows up, so you can�t pull up until the rocket hits the target. Can�t fly too slowly or you run outta fuel. Fly too fast, can�t pull up quick enough, hit building. You starting to get the picture yet? Oh, and you get ONE life. Just one, to get as high a score as you can.
Level 1 gives you the same layout of enemies and pattern of planes each time, but I, surprisingly, didn�t find it monotonous. The higher levels tend to have somewhat more rugged terrain, leaving less room for manoeuvring, and more chance of slamming into the side of a hill.
The Pup |  |
