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Never one to do anything by half, Imagine opens this new game with nothing less than the Dam Busters' March. This can be forgiven as the company has produced an outstanding piece of software which is somewhere between a flight simulation and a 3D Defender.

The aim is to use your five lives to notch up a high score by shooting down tanks and boats and planes while simultaneously saving refugees on the ground. Initially it looks rather complicated to play, with the instruction sheet describing protective shields, long-range scanners and something called an attitude scanner. This isn't a revolutionary new interactive device to tell you whether your heart's really in the game, just a misprint.

But in fact, the game is simple. The keyboard can be used, but all you really need is a joystick to control movement and to fire, and if you don't have a joystick (several types have been catered for) then this is probably the game to make you go out and buy one.

You are in the cockpit of an aircraft, the Ground Skimmer, and about to set out on your mission to protect the little men who run about on the ground and occasionally stand and shake their fists at the heavens. Your protective shields are slowly lost under the continual barrage of fire, and when they disappear completely it's an automatic nose-dive into the ground and a lost life. You also lose lives, of course, by careless flying and hitting the deck yourself.

The first screen starts you above a scrolling landscape, the opposition being aircraft, which fly across the screen or zoom towards you in very realistic 3D fashion. Survive this and you're in the desert, with palm trees and tanks sweeping towards and under you as you skim over the sand. Wipe out the tanks and you're over the sea with a fleet of ships to sort out. By the time you reach the screens which combine planes and tanks or planes and ships your work is really cut out.

Black marks for incomplete instructions.

But that apart, the speed of Zzoom, its sound, and especially the 3D graphics, are all superbly done, and this is one of only a handful of games around that could truly be said to be of arcade standard.