In case you're wondering, by the way, the reason we're giving a budget game a full page review is because (a) it's also an original CD32 game, (b) because it seemed too good not to get more space, and (c) because we felt like it. Okay? Anyway, on with the review.

It seems that due to recent staff changes, we're so old that we all remember Lunar Lander, the ancient Atari game based (quite unsurprisingly) on landing on the moon without crashing, exploding or otherwise scratching the paintwork. The basis of the game was that Newtonian physics were alive and well and that gravity can be a real pain in the bum sometimes, and both these features went on to appear in the fabulous Thrust and the classic Atari ST game Oids.

The thing is, the game's world like Hollywood - it hates to see a good idea go to waste, and would much rather repackage it, redesign it and put some bigger explosions in it. Which brings us neatly onto Fly Harder.

We're back firmly in 'Good guy/bad alien' territory, with the evil empire of Thargoid exploiting the planet's resources by fitting eight giant reactors in caves and buildings. Not the most credible story line, which is why we tend not to waste much time on them in our reviews. Your mission is to fly into these heavily guarded complexes and overload the reactors by dropping energy pods on them. Simple.

Well, no, not in ay meaningful sense of the word, for many things conspire against you. The most obvious thing is gravity, which constantly tries to splat you against the hard, unforgiving floors of the caves. Thankfully, your ship's got a powerful engine and a limited supply of fuel to keep it going.

Secondly, there's all manner of Thargoid gunners and flying things that get in your way, shoot at you and generally try and make sure your day is less than a nice one. Fortunately, your ship can take a fair old bashing before it blows up (shown by an energy bar at the top of the screen) and also gradually repairs itself, giving you a potentially long life span. To fight back, you've got a weedy gun for starters and various power-ups to pick up. Hurrah for high energy particle beam weapons!

OVERSHOOT
Finally, the energy pods that you pick up have an apparent mass greater than the ship. This means that once you've picked up a globe in your tractor beam, fired up the thrusters and shot off somewhere, you're going to stop a lot quicker than the globe is. It's all about inertia, you see, so while you may stop short of a wall, the globe will carry on and smash into it.

This turns the gameplay into a series of delicate manoeuvres, a sort of finesse-'em-up if you will, and it's this light-touch approach that makes the game so compulsive. Unfortunately, it also makes it practically impossible to play for the first hour or so, when the game just sneers and laughs at you as you blunder uncontrollably into force shields, reverse gravity generators and enemy spaceships.

Fly Harder doesn't have a learning curve - you can either play it or you can't.
Despite that, I simply love it to death, even though it's only got eight levels and even though I can only play it on the easiest level with the wimpiest gravity.

After a few hours you realise it's all about shooting switches to turn off various force shields, and that all the shooting aliens nonsense is just distractions, and every time I crashed, I just came back for more.

It's saved from being impossibly hard by the keyboard option, which gives you the precise control that a joystick doesn't, and the low price sort of excuses the low number of levels. Accelerating at a constant rate of 9.8 m/sec/sec has never been so much of a challenge.

Strange name for a game Fly Harder. Does it mean you're not trying hard enough? And how does it know if you haven't played the game before? But more of that later. Anyway, a rum bunch known as the Targoid insect people have taken over the good planet Zarkow and installed reactors that exploit the planet's resources - oh crumbs. Why can't these aliens ever be called the Smith insect folk, and why can't they invade planet Tompkins? But I digress.

Your boss, Captain Jenkins - oh all right, it's Captain Nokdar - is sending you in to blow the reactors to zargoreens; I mean smithereens. Hurrah, at last, a proper word.

To destroy these parasitic reactors, you must fly cast a cunningly-placed energy sphere which then follows your ship, before dropping it on a reactor and hey presto - Kaboom!

Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds. And to cap it all, this darn stupid planet has something called gravity so you ship bobs and rolls like a drunken duck. This makes some of the incredibly tricky manoeuvres nigh on impossible.

Fly Harder is available on both floppy and CD format - the CD32 joypad offers reasonable control while joysticks are a bind. But by far the best way to manoeuvre your ship is with the keyboard which gives much closer control.

So, with eight levels of thrusting mayhem ahead, it's one heck of a tough task. After the initial shock of crashing 40 times on the trot, Fly Harder becomes extremely addictive.

Tough and rumble
Sure, this isn't the most sophisticated of fare, but most of you haven't been to Leeds so you won't know what sophistication is anyway. It's really no more than Space Invaders, Thrust and Defender put into a large pot, boiled and served with a bit of garnish. But you can't stop playing it.

Baddies abound. They range from bullet-spewing ground guns to parachuting bobs to spaceships that follow you all over the shop, and if that wasn't trouble enough, laser beams protect the areas where the all-important energy spheres are located. But a sneaky bullet on the nearest orange button will turn them off, although you can guarantee that on your return, they'll be on again. So Fly Harder isn't just an out and out shoot-em-up, there are little tasks that have to be undertaken before you complete a mission.

The actual playing area of some of the missions is no more than a couple of screens, although this doesn't mean that they're easy. Getting past level two has provided the AF team with a major challenge. Here the gravity changes halfway down the screen - one minute you float downward, next you're pulled up.

And as you progress, sorry, if you progress, to further levels, the aliens proliferate and the manoeuvres become still trickier. But don't be put off, because Fly Harder is fun (don't play it when your Gran's in the room though because the expletives fly when the going gets tough).

For those who have ambitions to follow the infamous Birdman, he who interrupts boxing and football matches while dropping in on the Queen now and again, then Fly Harder is the perfect training ground.

If you were still in nursery school when Thrust was released, I will give you a quick refresher on the finer points of the game Fly Harder. The idea of the game is to pick up shiny silver balls and drop them on a large reactor, found somewhere else on the same level. Your ship has a single jet engine, which it can fire in any direction to combat the ever present gravity (hence 'thrust' for the lower IQ levelled readers).

There are more than enough things to crash into, including other ships, and plenty of ground material. The clever thing here is that you have an energy bar on the top of the screen that goes down as you pass through other object like some sort of shield.

Thankfully, you have a gun to disperse the enemy with, but don't get too carried away flying around the screen as you also have a limited supply of fuel, indicated by another bat on top of the screen. To help you out in the game, you must find fuel pods and energy pods to replenish your spent stocks and, albeit slowly, energy does replenish itself.

The first thing you notice about the game is how hard it is. Your ship flies all over the screen crashing into everything, as you try to get the thruster firing in the right direction and gain some sort of 'it goes where you want it to go' control. After a while though, you begin to get proper movement and in no time at all you realise how good Fly Harder is, as long as you don't get too frustrated.

Fly Harder is a very addictive game. Once you've made it through a few levels all you want is more - even if gravity is coming from all directions and a very annoying laser beam tends to use up your 4 lives before you can say "hang on a second, I was past that extremely nasty looking laser beam".

Fly Harder is a fine title once you get past the initial control problems. Worth a look.