Most people will recognise the name Top Gun from the 80s ‘classic’ starring Tom Cruise, and while the developers say their PSN game is based on the movie, the comparisons are light if present at all.
Top Gun‘s nearest relative would obviously be flight sim series Ace Combat, and developers doublesix have taken the arcade side of this experience, rather than making a game far too complicated for its own good. For those who already have a firm grasp on the genre, Top Gun may seem a little too basic at first, though this only allows newcomers room to breathe for the first mission or two.
In fact, the game is set up so you progress through three stages of your Pilot career. Following basic flight training, you progress to the Top Gun Acadamy, where you practice the various flight techniques and tricks you’ll be using when confronted with real enemy pilots. Once you’ve passed these first half dozen missions, the main part of the campaign begins, a slight disappointment as there are just about the same amount of training missions as these ‘real’ stages. The difficulty ramps up considerably at this point though, which at first seems like a welcome change from earlier stages, but it soon becomes apparant that luck is a major part of succeeding in Top Gun.
Your missile lock system is incredibly effective when you get the hang of it, but obviously the same system is present in the enemy too, as they can lock onto you every time they try. This can mean that if your luck is running dry, a barrage of missiles can hit you one after the other, draining your defences to their minimum. With a rebounding ‘health’ meter involved though, the problems this can cause are often prevented seconds after they are started, perfecting techniques for how to avoid these instances becoming more and more important as each mission goes by.
Despite some poorly chosen difficulty spikes, the overall gameplay experience of Top Gun is genuinely exciting. I had plenty of fun picking off fighter jets from as far away as I could, even if some of the objective based challenges rarely deviate from simple dog fights. The game can be a rewarding challenge when you come across sections with both air and ground targets to battle, deciding strategies before you begin making a victory that bit sweeter when the results screen appears 10/15 minutes later. The campaign mode is definitely fun but only as long as it lasts.
This is where the 16 player Online Multiplayer and Horde mode come in, both of which working well thanks to the basic fundamentals being in place from the campaign. Horde works as a never-ending mode where wave after wave of jets face you in increasing numbers until you make a mistake. This is all well and good, but most people will end up spending most of their time outside the campaign in the Online Multiplayer. Although it can be difficult to get hold of 15 other players, the range of modes and option available make for a worthwhile experience.
For a downloadable game, Top Gun packs plenty of content sure to keep flight simulation fans busy for a while. It may not be the most polished game in the genre, the cutscenes that were promised to be top notch making the skip button second nature everytime they appear, but for $10 you can do much worse on the Playstation Store.
[Rating: 3/5]
