OK, it doesn't sound great - it sounds downright stereotypical arcade shooty shite actually (well, apart from the jazz). But, it doesn't really matter when you come to realise that Echelon: WW plays quite well. Echelon combines basic sim aspects of flying, with some good action, pitting you in a bunch of combat missions against some dodgy alien foe in a war of... err... something. The background story is a bit vague and just seems like an excuse to deliver this type of game, but then, when you're a rough tough fighter pilot who cares who you're fighting - you're just interested in who to blow up next, and whether the bar is open... Once you're in the main campaign, everything is nudged along nicely by the regularly humorous briefings and debriefings given (usually just in text) by your commander.

   

After getting the briefing on your next mission, you pick your fighter (the craft you choose can vary quite widely, although you are usually stuck to picking from a selection of a certain class of craft, such as an interceptor, for each mission), pick your weapon payload (which varies with each fighter), and off you go. On each mission you guide your chosen craft from takeoff to landing, and although you can get your autopilot to fly while there's no threat around, it's a lot more fun to go swooping through the canyons yourself - plus the autopilot won't keep you at a low enough level for most missions. The flying is very gratifying, and the various craft all handle very differently - to get the best out of the game, you'll want a proper flight stick. The combat isn't bad either, although it's a rather simple 'point your fighter in the right direction and shoot' affair - not very 2351AD. However, the problems start when you are forced to replay missions after getting shot down - it can take a couple of minutes to get to a target, and you don't want to have to fly through that each time, just to get shot down after 30 seconds at your target... swooping through canyons can become dull after 20 attempts on the same mission.

The missions are heavily scripted - you'll find the same things happening again and again, and although the dialog is interesting and sometimes funny the first time out, it's not so great after a few repeats. There is an equally annoying problem with the objectives - it can sometimes be damn hard to figure out what you are actually meant to be doing. Although you will always have your next waypoint, or target shown on the HUD, there are occasions where you're really not sure what you're meant to be doing with it. Just to finish off my paragraph of grumbling, the missions can get outrageously hard at times.

   

On the other hand, you can accelerate the time through the boring bits, you can skip the dialog, it is possible to figure out what to do eventually on each mission, and you can bring the difficulty down to a reasonable level, or simply turn on the 'infinite armour' option for a mission when you get stuck.

The graphics of the game are a somewhat mixed bag - there are some nice effects, like when you take out other fighters, and they drop to ground in pieces, or glide down burning and out of power (until you act like a mean bastard and put another few rounds in them, at which point they explode into large chunks that plummet to the ground - muaahahaa), but overall the game looks a good couple of years behind the times.

In the end, Echelon Wind Warriors provides enough good bits to almost make the bad bits insignificant, but the bottom line is that this rough diamond would need a lot of buffing to make it look good. On the other hand, there's little out there to compare it to, so if you're a flight combat freak, you may well want to give it a look. There - a thorough review of a game with a title like this and I didn't 'drop one' fart joke.