Rowan have done this through an incredibly detailed strategic campaign layer, in which you play out the role of RAF or Luftwaffe commander in real time. The campaign game is a fantastically rich wargaming experience in its own right, even if you choose never to jump into the cockpit and actually fly a plane. But more on that later. BoB is still primarily a flight sim, so let's see how it measures up.

The game allows you to fly 5 of the aircraft that took part in the Battle of Britain - the Spitfire and Hurricane for the RAF, the Bf109, Me110, and Ju87D Stuka for the Luftwaffe. You are also able to fly as a gunner (but not pilot) in three German medium bombers - the Heinkel He111, Dornier Do17, and Junkers Ju88.

The first time you strap yourself into a Spitfire in a training mission, you might find yourself a bit under-whelmed, for a number of reasons - starting with the graphics.

The game is built on the MiG Alley engine, so the graphics look a bit dated in places. The terrain in particular is very ordinary. It looks good from about 7000 feet upwards, but at lower altitudes the multicoloured tiles that pass for fields look terribly flat and blurry - despite thousands of individual sheep, cows and hay bales being scattered on them in an attempt to break them up. The city areas and forests - as opposed to individual buildings and trees - are particularly bad, being represented by raised, flat, angular blocks of a more-or-less appropriate colour.

However, the aircraft models look pretty good, and damage is modelled to the extent that you can see from the external view why your plane is pulling to the right so badly (i.e, your wing is full of holes). The cockpits are well drawn, though some of the gauges are a little hard to read. Windscreen reflections are excellent. Clouds - if your machine can handle them during the big battles - are fantastically realistic. Aircraft just gently melt into cloud banks and disappear.

A note here that if you are a Voodoo user (like me) and not capable of real 32-bit colour in 3D, the sky will look fairly unimpressive, with obvious horizontal shading bands. Apparently this effect disappears in 32-bit colour, so if you don't have a GeForce, now would be a good time to go buy one! You may also be under-whelmed by the training missions themselves. They are, frankly, a bit of a joke. Mission one: take off. Well, go on then - take off! No tutorial here, folks.

Fortunately, the game comes with a reasonably good manual and a keyguide. The keyguide is a vital component in any flight sim game, I reckon, since every button is likely to do something and leafing through a manual to figure it out during flight is just not feasible. The manual itself is fairly weighty, but it is heavily focussed on the campaign game and on providing historical background (tactics and so on) and technical data. There is very little explanation of how to actually fly the planes or even of what the dozens of game options actually do.

And there really are dozens of game options. You can tailor both the difficulty of the flight model and the combat to suit your preference. For the serious simmers, the game allows you full engine management, from working the magnetos and primer pumps at start-up through to controlling propeller pitch during flight for engine braking and so on.

Each aircraft has a full interactive cockpit, which must be used to access some of the more complex engine-management tools. When the interactive cockpits are on, the mouse cursor acts as the pilot's hand - you move it over the control and click to activate. The system seems to work pretty well if you are a masochist. Me, I'd rather worry about not getting my ass shot up by those 109s.

This is a difficult game, especially if you're not an experienced flight sim buff. The planes being modelled were all quite fickle and would stall and spin if you so much as looked at them funny. Even with the novice flight model, which won't allow either of those things to happen to you, combat is a real challenge. The planes turn and climb fairly slowly, which makes it very difficult to get on an enemy's tail and stay there long enough to bring him down. Planes - especially bombers - can take a lot of .303 rounds before they come down.

Visibility is also limited from within the cockpit. There is a panning free-look mode, which you can use instead of set views - this works well with the mouse in your left hand looking around while your right hand is on the stick, occasionally re-centring your view. But it is still hard to keep a track of your target (I found the padlock view, while working as advertised, next to useless as a combat aid).

Add into this a very challenging AI that flies to a plane's strengths - Me110s won't get into pointless turning battles with a Spitfire - and you have your work cut out making a kill.

Fortunately there are a number of 'helper' options to make combat easier, from text labels to distinguish one distant speck from another, to cross or roundel icons to indicate the position of other aircraft outside your field of view but within your peripheral vision. Realistic? Well, I guess not, but they make the game more playable - especially considering that your average air battle in this game involves well over a hundred aircraft and possibly more like a thousand.