TopGun:Fire at Will (c) Spectrum Holobyte
Click the picture for a trainer of the game.
Top Gun may be of interest to diehard fans of the movie, or as a "training" simulation for those intimidated by EF-2000. Everyone else is advised to "turn and burn."
By attempting to simultaneously appeal to both the arcade gamer and the flight-sim fanatic, Top Gun tries to offer something for everyone. Unfortunately, like so many games that seek to bridge genres, Top Gun ultimately disappoints both of its intended audiences. The problem lies in its gameplay: too complex for the arcade fan, and too simplistic to pose a real challenge to experienced fighter jocks.
Spectrum seems to have forgotten that the one critical element of any arcade-style game is action. Even on the "Arcade" setting, Top Gun fails to deliver any sort of rewarding play. Dogfights are typically quick, long range missile engagements, followed by relatively long periods of uneventful flying.
On the other hand, the most critical element of a traditional flight simulation is realism. Once again, Top Gun fails to score a kill. The simplistic combat model is made even worse by the seemingly intentional disregard for realism found in the dialog. To be fair, though, the movie never attempted to be very realistic. This flaw was easily overlooked in the movie because the action, cinematography, and music were all first rate. Sadly, this is not the case with the game.
The graphics in Top Gun are as schizophrenic as the gameplay. In hi-res mode, the aircraft are rendered with detailed texture maps, giving them a nice, clean look on par with US Navy Fighters. Unfortunately, the terrain looks absolutely atrocious. Even in 640x480 resolution, the earth looks blocky and cluttered. Even worse, it is almost impossible to pick out any detail among the flickering brown and green globs (even airports are difficult to see until you are right on top of them.) The cutscenes within the game are often marred by cheesy dialogue and mediocre acting, and even the theme song "Dangerzone" has been redubbed by an unknown artist.
In summary, Top Gun is a title that is sub-par in almost every aspect. It may be of interest to diehard fans of the movie, or as a "training" simulation for those intimidated by SU-27 or EF-2000. Everyone else is advised to "turn and burn".
By Jim Varner
I bought Top Gun: Fire At Will for two reasons:
1. Top Gun is one of my favorite movies.
2. The game received mostly positive reviews.
My expectations for this title were high because it did well with most reviewers, and the game looked cool on the back of the box. Did it live up to my expectations? As Merlin would say, "Yes Sir!"
Based on the popular Top Gun movies and awesome NES titles, you play as Maverick, a hot shot pilot in training at the Top Gun Academy. You are also competing against other pilots to win the Top Gun trophy and become the pilot of your dreams. You fly your F-14 Tomcat through 40, count 'em, 40 missions to earn the Top Gun trophy and become the "best of the best." You're never alone on these missions, however. Merlin, your backseat pilot, is there to help you out with detailed and not-so-detailed information.
There isn't much action in the actual missions, but there is a solution to that which I think to many reviewers have overlooked: The game has multiplayer support. You can play against a friend or a whole group of friends in a network pool via modem. This and the multiple missions help keep you in the game much longer than most flight sims do.
However, Top Gun isn't for everybody. Hardcore flight sim fanatics will be annoyed by the game's lack of realism.
Top Gun obviously isn't attempting realism because the movie wasn't very realistic either. But wouldn't you think the makers of the top selling Falcon 3.0 would know this is supposed to be a flight "sim"? The main object of a simulation is to make you feel like you're actually there, actually controlling the vehicle. And Top Gun just doesn't achieve that level of realism.
Speed demons will also be annoyed with the game's slow frame rate. Yet in a way a slow frame rate is actually a good thing because it makes it easier to concentrate and make the right move. But isn't the F-14 Tomcat supposed to be one of the fastest jets in the nation?
These problems aside, let's get down to the graphics and sounds. Visually, in high resolution mode with the "SUPERHI" code turned on, your plane is rendered with a nice polygon look and impressive detail. But the terrain itself looks absolutely horrendous unless you run the game in hi-res mode with millions of colors and the "superhi" code turned on. And even then, the terrain looks mediocre at best, though there are a few exceptions.
The redone "Danger Zone" is outstanding, and the music is sampled straight from the movie. The dialogue isn't that bad, and the acting is fairly decent. Though hearing Merlin screaming "Badger Bombers" and "Mink-27's" throughout an entire turkey shoot gets annoying quickly.
Overall, if realism is what you're looking for, then stick to games like Falcon 3.0 and SU-27 Flanker. But if you're a fan of the Top Gun movies, or you're just looking for a flight sim with a few multimedia kicks, then Top Gun is just the game you've been looking for.
By Marty Alther
More information can be found at Spectrum Holobyte's Top Gun Site
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TopGun:Hornet's Nest (c) Spectrum Holobyte
Click the picture for a trainer of the game.
Easy to handle controls coupled with easy to manage weapons and radar give you the look and feel of really flying the Navy's premier fighter jet.
Receive your pre-campaign briefings from Commander Hondo (James Tolkan) himself.
For the ultimate in multiplayer dogfights, you and up to seven of your buddies can engage in LAN or Internet play.
No time to admire the scenery. You've got to identify your targets and take them out-quickly!
MicroProse has a license to kill. In this case, that license is the rights to Top Gun, the cheesy but enjoyable Tom Cruise aerial celluloid romp from the '80s. A few years back, the company's Top Gun: Fire at Will provided an entertaining flight experience for beginner and casual sim pilots. But the sequel, Top Gun: Hornet's Nest, is a mistargeted, ill-designed mess that's too tough for beginners, too silly for experts, and more an exercise in frustration than in fun.
The setup of the game is only tenuously related to the film, or to the previous Top Gun sim, for that matter. Your character is called Maverick, and each campaign is introduced by a video of actor James Tolkan, reprising his role as Hondo, Mav's commander. The resemblence ends here. Your backseater is gone - you now fly solo in an F/A-18 Hornet, rather than an F-14 Tomcat. And while Top Gun's plot wasn't exactly out of the Navy yearbook, this game's campaigns have far more in common with the corniest of James Bond films than with the Tom Cruise movie.
Not that that's a bad thing in itself. In fact, when taking on mad Russian general Martikov in the Siberian campaign, I got a kick when the game shifted from taking out regular ground targets to destroying secret weapons of mass destruction that were threatening to fire a huge electrical pulse with the potential to wipe out entire cities. Unfortunately, although the missions were certainly unique in nature, they went from challenging to frustrating. In the first mission of the second campaign, set in Iraq, you task is to take out a series of radar-jamming stations. Sounds interesting enough, but you have to take out nine stations, each of which requires two missile hits to be destroyed. In addition, the skies are swarming with enemy aircraft, which you must take out with heat-seeking missiles since your radar is jammed. And you really should eliminate some of the SAM sites around your target. By the time I completed this mission, I'd felled 12 enemy planes and destroyed 20 ground targets. Good thing the gun is overpowered.
With those odds, I don't think you need to feel as if you're cheating if you choose the unlimited ammo option. On those missions where you have wingmen to help you, they're more often than not cannon fodder, if they don't die a prescripted death or fly into the ground. On top of all this, many missions have time limits.
Luckily, your plane is better armed than the typical F/A-18 Hornet. In addition to realistic ordnance such as Sidewinder and AMRAAM missiles, there are also some fictional armaments, which can be carried in greater quantities or which have particularly strong effects. My favorite is the Starflower, essentially an aerial cluster bomb that can take out a group of targets flying close together.
The Maverick air-to-ground missile modeling is particularly frustrating. It will only lock onto vehicles, not the buildings or structures you often have to destroy. You can fire missiles at buildings by bore-sighting them - aiming your plane directly at the target. But if you've previously locked onto a vehicle, your valuable Maverick will go careening offscreen to blow it up instead.
The sim offers three perspectives on the action: a cockpit view with instrument panel, a full-screen HUD (heads-up display) view, and an external view from behind your plane. You'll probably spend most of your time in HUD view, since the instrument panel blocks the bomb-targeting indicator on the HUD.
The sim's fatal flaw, however, is the flight model, which will please no one. This F/A-18 turns more like a B-52 than a fighter jet - changing directions takes forever. It makes you wonder what Zipper Interactive was thinking when it tuned the plane's handling. While the game's missions, weapons, and storylines are clearly targeted at action gamers, the plane is so unresponsive that it's more difficult to fly successfully than Falcon 4.0's F-16.
There are some good points. The game's graphics and sounds are top-notch. The graphics engine, which will also be seen in MechWarrior III, is very fast, allowing smooth play at 1024x768 even on a Matrox Marvel card, which is no 3D speed demon. Special effects are very good, although the terrain itself is fairly polygonal.
The initial missions can be interesting, until the overwhelming odds begin to take their toll. They're certainly anything but typical - what other sim lets you navigate your F/A-18 through a maze, Quake-style? The configurable instant action mode is good for familiarizing yourself with your craft. Multiplayer mode is dogfight-only, although team play is allowed. The game does allow you to land and rearm/refuel, an important detail left out of multiplayer mode in other recent sims.
However, you can probably find better places to spend your multiplayer moments. Top Gun: Hornet's Nest has little to recommend it, other than some original (if wacky) mission scenarios. Sim fans will be put off by the bad flight modeling and unbelievable scenarios, while action gamers will find the plane's sluggish handling and poorly implemented weapons an exercise in frustration. The real losers are the film's fans, who will find that the only connection to the movie is a few brief video appearances by Hondo. This Top Gun is a washout.
By Denny Atkin
More information can be found at Spectrum Holobyte's Top Gun Site
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Click the box to download an 8.0 meg avi of the game
System Requirements: 486/66, 8 MB RAM, SVGA-Local Bus, sound board, DOS
Top Gun patch - (tgv11.exe, 535K) This is the version 1.1 update for Top Gun. It corrects the End Mission crash and includes a fix for users who are using a HP Pavilion and S3 Trio 64V+ or S3 Trio 32 video card under Windows 95. It also includes a fix for the Master Volume setup
Mission of the Month 1-5
Mission of the Month 6-9
Hints and Tips
Designer's Notes
Click the box to download the 25.1 Meg Demo
System Requirements: Pentium-166, 32 MB RAM, SVGA w/ 4MB, sound board, Windows 95; Windows 98
Top Gun: Hornet's Nest Patch v1.1
Other cool aviation game demos:
A-10 Cuba!
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European Air War
F-15
F-16 Multirole Fighter
F-22 Lighting 2
F-22 Lighting 3
F-22 Raptor
Falcon 4.0 Part 1
Falcon 4.0 Part 2
Fighter Ace 2
Fighter Ace v1.5
Flanker 2.0
F/A-18 Hornet 3.0
F/A-18 Korea
iF-16
iF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter
Israeli Air Force
KA-52 Alligator
Longbow 2
Mig Alley
Red Baron 3D
Su-27 Flanker
Team Apache
WWII Fighters
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