When you load up NOT COBRA COMMAND for the first time, your jaw will drop to the floor in amazement at the movie-quality animation on display in the lengthy intro sequence. And yes, we really do mean movie-quality. In fact, the movie we mean specifically is the awesome Manga cartoon Akira - the big, bold explosions, the liberal splashings of colour, the dynamic speed-blur effect of rockets firing and all that kind of palaver, they're all present and correct in the intro of NOT COBRA COMMAND. The really really impressive thing, though, is that once you start the actual game, it's exactly the same...

Unfortunately, that's a bit too literally true. Not only is the graphic quality of the game the same as the intro, the level of player interaction is disturbingly similar as well. If you remember the old laserdisc coin-ops, like Dragon's Lair and Space Ace and lots more besides, you'll be familiar with the concept of a game which appears to play itself for about 90% of the time, only calling the player into action at certain intermissions in the proceedings to perform a simple joystick move which either lets you move on to the next bit of the game if done correctly, or results in your instant death if otherwise. And that's pretty much what you get in NOT COBRA COMMAND. Well, maybe that's a fraction unfair. NOT COBRA COMMAND has slightly more in common with the second generation of laserdisc games, like Atari's awesome Firefox, in that all the way through the game you can wiggle the joypad around and have some sort of effect on what's happening onscreen, but since all it actually lets you do is move a gunsight which only lets you shoot things the Megadrive feels like you should be allowed to shoot, it's still not all that interactive. This is getting a bit confusing, isn't it? Let's explain properly.

In NOT COBRA COMMAND, your Mega CD takes you through a predefined action sequence. At certain points, the screen will helpfully suggest (accompanied by some excellent sampled speech) that you should 'GO UP' or 'GO RIGHT' or whatever, at which point holding down the joypad in the appropriate direction until the screen stops telling you to do whatever it is you were doing, will allow you to continue. Miss the move, or release the pad too early, and you'll crash horrifically into something and get a chance to watch one of the rather lovely animated death sequences. In addition to all this, many enemy targets (also in a predefined sequence) attack you as you progress. You can only shoot them when your onboard computer locks on to them (you can blast away all you like before they're named as a target, but it won't have any effect), at which point you have to manouevre your onscreen gunsight to bring them down with gunfire or missiles. Miss your shot, or don't make it quickly enough, (or fail to work out exactly what you're supposed to be shooting at in the dramatic but sometimes too dynamically messy to see blur of action in front of you) and you'll be blown unceremoniously out of the sky. And there you have the gameplay in its entirety. Survive nine (pretty short) levels of this without waving bye-bye to all your lives and continues, and you've won. Hmm.

So what else do you need to know? Well, how about how good the little movie sequences actually are, for a start? The answer to that one is, 'They're pretty good'. Oh sure, the graphics and animation are the most totally impressive thing you've ever seen on your monitor screen, but show any of this to Barry Norman and he'd laugh you out of court. It all moves beautifully, but the effect is like a really badly-cut porn movie (or something) - the action leaps from place to place occasionally with no immediately obvious explanation or linkage, and it can knock holes in the atmosphere which is otherwise immense. The biggest reason for this is the soundtrack - it's truly top-drawer stuff, all crackly intercom messages, butch booming voices relaying instructions and gung-ho exhortations to go for it and kick ass and all that kind of stuff, together with the heavy whup-whup-whup of rotor blades and seriously meaty explosions. In fact, if you've played the brilliant Namco coin-op Starblade (which isn't, come to think of it, altogether a million miles away from NOT COBRA COMMAND in concept, just a lot more smoothly executed and a lot more interactive), you'll have a very good idea of what to expect from this, sonically speaking. Certainly it stomps all over anything else I've ever heard coming from anything remotely connected to a Megadrive.

So that's the graphics, sound and gameplay pretty much covered. What's left? Oh yeah, the important bit - is it actually any fun? Well, yes it is. Although it's a very limited idea, the very simplicity of it, and specifically the way everything always happens at the same place and the same time every time you play it, means that it's very easy (in the short term at least) to get yourself addicted to it - whenever you get yourself killed, you know that all you have to do to get past that bit next time is remember what happened and be ready for it, and that always seems like an easy enough thing to manage, so you have another go. The trouble is, that's also the game's downfall. If you do get addicted, you'll persevere solidly for a couple of days and, unless you've got a really useless memory, you'll get to the end equally quickly. Since the main grabbing point of NOT COBRA COMMAND is the urge to get on and see the next amazingly impressive bit of animation, once you've seen all the amazingly impressive bits of animation the compulsion to play disappears almost instantaneously, and at £60 this is a pretty expensive couple of days' amusement. Ideally (and hey, it's Christmas soon), spend someone else's money on this.

GRAPHICS 9

SOUND 10

GAMEPLAY 3

ADDICTION 7

It looks absolutely beautiful, but it's a memory test, not a game. Simple enough to be addictive, though, and worth at least a look just for the sheer 'Gosh wow' factor.

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