Flight sims have always been popular. They allow you to take to the skies engage in dogfights, fly in the Battle of Britain, take the controls of Stealth Fighters or... try your hand at flying an Airbus. Hmm. If there was ever a "serious" game this is it; we are talking about pure simulation. You are the pilot of an airbus; you get your flight plan and fly between airports.

In an attempt to get some gameplay in here, the makers have added pilot ranks. The aim is to be promoted form Student Pilot to Chief Pilot. How? Fly about a lot and don't kill all your passengers.

Before starting your career, you'll do well to try out the training mode to see how things are done. The manual contains a brief guide for your initial flight, but unfortunately it is badly put together. If a game has 150 pages of manual the information needs to be supplied in a logical order.

The tutorial chapter omits to tell you about entering the elevation code for the airport - this information is hidden earlier in the manual in what seems to be an unrelated area on enhancements. Without this information,your Airbus sits switches off on the ground. It is, I guess, a bizarre and tedious form of copy protection.

To start the gam, you need to fill in the pre-flight information, with details of the airports you'll fly to and from, what time you'll depart and with what cargo, passengers and fuel. At this point, you may get slightly wary, because the mouse control is all over the place. It would have been very easy to put a better interface in for this information. In fact all the pre-flight graphics are pretty dull Dpaint efforts.

Anyway, soon enough you're sat in the cockpit ready to start her up and find a runway. After a highly exciting time spent taxiing, you can whack the engines up to full throttle and take off.

A couple of things seem amiss here. Firstly, you can be bombing along at over 100 knots and not really have yourself correctly aligned on the runway and it doesn't seem to matter. Secondly, it doesn't matter how the nose is set on the ground, as soon as you hit over 130 and pull back, the plane takes off.

You can fly around a bit and then try a landing which is infinitely more difficult than taking off. The actually flying part is OK, with reasonably smooth graphics, but the flight is very, very slow and even with accelerated time, you soon find yourself bored enough to start playing around.

This is an update and has had the autopilot revised and "seek and hold" functions added. The Europian scenario has been extended to include more countries and there are 29 new aerodromes, and 200 new navigation radio beacons (wow!). The visual improvements are especially welcome, but Airbus is never going to be very engaging.

The problem is it is very realistic and consequently very boring. If you ever wandered how un-exciting flying an Airbus is, if you've always wanted a simulation of a bloody big plane, then your prayers have been answered. Just don't buy this thinking it's another F117-A because you'll be in for a big shock.

Gazing through the windscreen of my Airbus A320, gritted teeth rigidly framed by my lips and a cloudy film forming across my corneas, I wondered how the world would react if Domark suddenly announced the imminent release of International Rugby Challenge '96, with stats updated for the new season and the clock still continuing to count down when the game was paused. Or if Mindscape decided to do BattleToads: The New Generation, with 20 extra levels all identical to the existing ones.

There are undoubtedly magazines (probably called 'Simulation World' or 'Analogue Joystick Pro') who will hail Airbus A420 2 respectively, giving thanks that there's still someone out there dedicated to bringing simulations of modern European airliners to the Amiga.

There are others, who will retype large sections of the press release, taliing semi-convincingly about 'improved cockpit/instrument presentation', 'additional interception/hold NAV function' and 'highly realistic light control/features, and, after glancing meekly towards their advertising departments, give it 73%, perhaps ending with some helpful like "If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort thing you'll like".

You are, however, reading AMIGA POWER. Your aim in Airbus A320 2 is to 'earn your wings' as a qualified pilot by flying about in an Airbus. An individual flight works as follows:

First, you specify yor flight plan by entering your start airport, your destination airport, an alternative destination airport in case of emergency (you can choose from airports all over Europe including the Mediterranean, along with North Africa and a few in America, but they all seem to have names like EGGP and EBBR) a number of passengers (up to 150) and fuel and cargo loads. (This is on the simulator, anyway - in 'career' mode much of this is decided for you)..

Then it's into the cockpit, and you must activate the flight systems by entering the transponder code, 300, say. Now press 4 to start the left engine, 6 to start the right engine, enter NAV1 and NAV2 codes (which "can serve as VOR or as ILS and includes DME", apparently), set the ADF, move the flaps to position 2 by pressing F2, release the parking brake with B, press 8 to increase the thrust, taxi onto the runway, press 8 to get 100% thrust, lift off at 137 knots, press F4 and Return to activate the auto heading control, set the pitch to 12-15 degrees, press F9 to retract the landing gear, switch on the EFCS with E, adjust the power to 92-94%, set the heading, wait for a very long time until the ILS becomes active, press Return to switch on the autopilot, wait for the plane to touch down on the runway automatically, press 0 to reverse thrust, press Space to brake, and wait for the plane to come to a standstill.

GEORGE KENNEDY
This is doing it the easy way, of course. As you become more proficient you can ignore things like the automatic landing system and perform your own landings, being scored accordingly to how close you came to the ideal touchdown speed, altitude and so on. And you'll have to study the supplied approach charts to determine the ideal approach pattern for each airport.

Airbus connoisseurs will welcome new features like the more realistic cockpit layout, the electronic flight information system, the option to use an analogue joystick, the radio communication (text-only, sadly), the extra airports - especially the American ones - and the mildly improved scenery.

The point is, though, that professional airline pilots are paid around £80,000 a year to do this sort of thing, along with a generous pension package. They probably find the actual business of flying modern airliners rather dull, instead gaining job satisfaction from crew camaraderie, the opportunity to visit cities around the world, the glamorous uniform and the £80,000 a year.

There's none of this in Airbus A320 2, and to pay £30 in order to sit there all evening staring at multi-function displays and D-AIRBs strikes me as madness.

There might be 110 airports to land at, but they all look, by any reasonable measure, identical, and simply involve variations in the bearings and things on your instrument panel. Every conceivable electronic flying aid may well be included, but they just mean there's even less for you to do, and you've got to disable as many of them as possible if you're not to be reduced merely to flipping the brakes off and on before take-off and after landing.

And, even with far better presentation - exterior views would give you a much more convincing sense of being in control of an airliner, with perhaps a tracking view across the tarmac towards the plane as you climb aboard, and sampled radio chatter would also help - it's hard to imagine an airliner sim ever being any fun. (Except if you could play a slimly elegant captain who has to foil a mid-air hijack attempt. And your passengers could include a little girl in need of a liver transplant and a pregnant woman. And your auto-pilot wouldn't work so you'd have to draw on your limited medical knowledge to help hem, returning periodically to the cockpit to prevent the plane from banking into a death dive).

Airbus A320 2 is all the bits of TFX or F-19 you'd normally switch off. While there are certainly people who will buy and enjoy it (the original A320 sold alarmingly well, particularly in its native Germany), it is beyond even the mighty beings of AMIGA POWER to comprehend them.

Whilst the Amiga has always had an excellent range of combat flight sims, including Gunship 2000 and Knights Of The Sky, choices for commercial or civil aviation are somewhat more limited with the only previous options being Microsoft's ancient Flight Simulator and the original Airbus as king of the 'serious' flight sims, Mirage have now released Airbus A320 II, as 'a significant update' of the first game which adds improved flight information systems and navigational displays, uprated autopilot functions and new destinations and numerous other additions.

In the hanger
The package contains the software on one disk, a huge Pilot's manual, three high altitude en-route charts and a set of approach charts. Sadly however, on close inspection, the documentation proves to be poorly translated and littered with spelling mistakes.

To its credit, the manual does contain a wealth of information on the principles of flight but is so poorly organised (the loading and configuration instructions appear several chapter after the tutorials!) that it's necessary to flip back and forth through its many pages to find the information you need to get your plane off the ground.

On loading the program it becomes clear that the quality of the presentation hasn't really improved since the first version. The mouse pointer jerks around the screen clumsily as you attempt to fill out your flight plan with start and destination points, fuel requirements and estimated departure times.

Instead of allowing you to pick your destination from a nice friendly menu, Airbus makes you dive back into the documentation to find the relevant acronym from its list of over a hundred airports in Europe and the United States and the tables for estimated fuel loads needed to reach them.

Correctly determining the fuel requirements is just one of the many factors that can influence your career as an commercial pilot - in order to extend Airbus' life-span, the game features a duty mode whereby you can climb the ladder from a rookie right up to the lofty heights of Chief Pilot.

Promotions and demotions are awarded based on various performance factors including how straight you hit the runway on touchdown and whether you had to use any reserve fuel to reach your destination. Once you've completed your flight plan you can check out the expected weather conditions before moving to the cockpit.

In training mode you can set up parameters for visibility and cloud cover but on switching to duty mode expect the worst as the computer selects them randomly. Once the weather report's done you can finally climb into the cockpit and take off.

On course
To set up the Airbus' navigational system you have to refer to the charts once more and tap in the relevant co-ordinates for your starts and destination points. This done, it's time to fire up the engines and taxi out onto the run way.

Commendable as it is to see ambitious projects such as Airbus on the Amiga, particularly at a time when software support has never been more important. I'm sorry to say that this misses the mark on many counts. Whilst by no means essential, the in-game presentation screens in Airbus are uninspired.

Couple this with a cockpit that looks dull and flat, even as drab 3D visuals slowly creep by, and you'll be instantly reminded of games which rightly being in an age long since past.

Lacking the immediate appeal of combat-orientated games, simulations such as this need more than simple 'fly from A to B' missions to sustain interest. How about trying to land a plane in heavy rain at night with howling crosswings and a dodgy engine? This would be just as compelling as dog-fighting a Mig. But nothing ever goes wrong in Airbus, you just go from one airport to another then back again. Impressive as the flight characteristics of this simulation may be, it's a soulless experience.

Fans of the original Airbus will find a more up-=to-date suite of controls and instruments, but little else to recommend it.