Beat on Ace difficulty. I started on Novice and did the first mission to get a feel for the game. It was easy so I restarted on Ace. I did not yet know how to change speed and was zooming around at mach 2 thinking how ridiculously hard Ace was to make me fly too fast to properly fight. Then I crashed from running out of fuel. Fuel does down at an alarming rate! This is not even playable. I figured I had to be missing something and discovered how to slow down. Ok much better now I can play properly.

I mostly went as slow as possible because it was easier to control and very fuel efficient. I liked the tactical aspect of watching the enemy on the map and planning what weapon to use. By the end game I had settled on using long range missiles only if there were 3 enemies coming after me, using the mid and short range missiles to shoot 1 enemy when there were 2 and finishing the last with the cannon. I found the best way to fight with the cannon was to approach head on at a lower altitude and shoot up at them. I got good at that but if it failed I would do a loop to get behind them and use barrel rolls to keep on target. I did not find it useful to try and speed up to chase them; just stay slow and let them turn around for another head on attack. The only trouble I had was dogfighting with more than 1 jet at the same time, which is why I tried to avoid it. The boss strafing runs were sometimes hard to do without taking damage. A couple times I had to go fast and make a few runs to avoid taking too much damage.

Great game and probably the best flight sim on the SNES. A bit better than even Super Strike Eagle.