Hornet Korea is like a hamburger - nice for a while but fundamentally unsatisfying.

It is hard to explain why this should be so. The flight model is largely good, the weapons work properly, the cockpit and padlock views are great. The graphics, cutting edge when they came on the market, still do very well today. Indeed the F/A-18 aircraft graphics may well still be the best out there.

The game is set, aptly enough, in Korea. Yet compared to Falcon 4 this is a mini-Korea, all targets only a couple of minutes away. This may be deemed to have its advantages, but you don't feel like you are in a real country. The campaign is a series of canned missions, with enemies being related only to your mission. You never feel you are in a living world. It is all there to suit you - and it ends up disappointing.

The best bits are the carrier training missions - I just go around landing and trying to catch the wire then catapulting off the front again - and multiplayer. The multiplayer is not very advanced - good just for dogfights, but it is fun to catch the new players out by turning off your radar and using the AIM-9 seeker head to acquire and lock your unsuspecting target.

The worst bits are the awful campaign and the control system. Not content with following the established pattern of using the F keys for views, the Hornet Korea team have come up with a completely new and unintuitive design. Not so bad if you use a HOTAS system, but annoying nevertheless.