Well, I tried and tried and tried and finally finished the Easy Solo level under Quick Game. Well, all right, it took me about three goes, it wasn’t that hard. (And one of those times I may have finished if I’d not distracted myself by taking a screen shot.)

Anyway, I then decided to bite the bullet and went into Campaign. Did the tutorial again, grumbling all the while, then found that the first level of the campaign is, yes, the Easy Solo level I’d just done. D’oh. Aced it first time, though. This is, as I suspected, a game you do get a lot better at very quickly.

It looks lovely, all right, using 3D graphics for movement on a 2D plane. (No pun intended.) It’s a bit like NiGHTS, basically. Shame I managed to take the single most boring screen shot possible.

I went to Quick Game, chose School and found myself in detailed and helpful tutorial. Once I inverted the controls it seemed to control well and it felt like it was something special.

However, then I tried a game mode where you have to collect floating balls without hitting mines and I just couldn’t get to some of them. It was quite strange. I think I probably just need more practice, to work out what the plane can do.

Then I tried a combat mission, where you have to destroy enemy planes. That was really rather fun, but, again, I found myself unable to actually get to some of the power ups the enemy planes dropped.

It’ll probably come with practice and I reckon I’m just missing some subtleties right now.

My main complaint is that after those Quick Game modes I went to Campaign and it tried to make me do the the tutorial again. It was useful first time, but I really don’t want to sit through it again, but I couldn’t find any way to skip it.