Review: Top Gun

Score: 62

Now, as you may have gathered (from my F/A-18F Super Hornet review), I have a partiality towards flight sims, making me an ideal target market for Top Gun. Roll the theme tune...

Top Gun is not so much a flight simulator as a glorified arcade game. There's a choice of characters from the film, though you never actually get to see any faces, so they could be Tom, Dick and Harry for all you know. And there are three planes to choose, which all fly in exactly the same way.

Once underway, on missions to take out ground targets or flocks of enemy fighters, the 3D engine is actually quite impressive, with a high frame rate, but the amount of ground detail is low and corners have clearly been cut somewhere along the line.

Targetting fighters and ground targets is very easy and almost foolproof and, combined with unlimited bullets for your cannon, this makes combat a bit too easy. Dying in a game chapter still means dying though, and you have to go back awhile, so at least Top Gun will take some time to complete.

Ultimately though, Top Gun is disappointing, both in its use of the film franchise and in the fact that it's not actually a flight sim - you can't do rolls, loops or any other stunts from the film - proving that there's not a full 3D flight model behind the scenes.

Verdict: fun for a while, but this could have been so much better...

(Buy Top Gun for the Nintendo DS Lite now)