Tornado Low Level (aka TLL) was written by Costa Panayi and published for the Spectrum by Vortex Software in 1984.

It is a classic action flight game whereby you control a ‘swing-wing’ Tornado jet and must ‘hug’ the terrain in order to wipe out enemy targets.

You don’t ‘shoot’ anything per se, you simply have to fly over them at the required height (ie. dangerously low to the ground), without crashing into anything. Much easier said than done, because most of your targets are located in tricky places to reach. You can judge the height of your craft by keeping an eye on both the altimeter, and also the shadow the plane casts (which was quite revolutionary in 1984).

Thankfully the landscape wraps around and doesn’t change, so at least you can learn the terrain to beat the game. Opening your Tornado’s wings up slows the craft down, while closing them speeds it up. Fuel can be replenished by landing on the available runway.

Tornado Low Level is a brilliant early Spectrum title that showed that shooting wasn’t necessarily required to make a great game. And TLL remains a great game to this day.

More: Tornado Low Level on Wikipedia