Why, oh why did Spectrum Holobyte spend all that time convincing people that Top Gun: Fire at Will! would just be a fun action game?! Well, there's a reason - the same reason people designing wargames these days seem to be shying away from the most hard-core players, in favor of a little innovation, a little more eye- and ear-candy, some simplification of the process of play and some disregard for the most finicky calculations of performance statistics. It's because trying to please this kind of audience is not only nearly impossible, it's not much fun, either; the feedback's almost perpetually negative, and this audience spends way too much time shouting up some one particular agreed-upon favorite and then blasting anything else that doesn't measure up to same. Yawn. More importantly, this audience is a small one - a much larger one is needed to make designing a new game profitable in the current industry. I'd rather have a Top Gun game with a goofy movie included at this point than a perfect statistical representation of an F-14 that ended up selling to maybe 15,000 people; 'cause the former means the genre will continue to survive. The latter would kill it.
On the other hand, while SpecHolo's marketing dept. was working overtime to draw in the Try Me crowd, the designers were obviously going to town trying their best to continue the best work done in Falcon 3.0, within the limits imposed on them by the need to incorporate the movie and sound elements. Don't be fooled: Top Gun is as competitive a simulation as anything else out there. You just have to be willing to live with its efforts to address a broader audience to get to that core simulation, and that's not very hard to do unless you're completely humorless and without a life.
The movie portion of the game isn't going to beat out the recent re-release of the original Top Gun movie on laserdisc with full Dolby AC-3 soundtrack in sales, but it does do an excellent job of going to the next stage beyond the ending of the original film. There's enough video in the game to make up a full, feature-length film, and while no-one in this film's going to be hired soon to do the Shakespeare repertory in Merry Olde as a result of the job done herein, the acting is consistent enough with the tone and style of the movie to remain plausible. To put it another way, the melodramatic, corn-ball style of the original Paramount release seems in retrospect like it was designed to compete with the style of movie-making seen in most current computer games; Top Gun is really the original "you gotta be kidding!" computer game-style movie, so making its sequel fit into the new medium without suffering a massive personality shift in the process turns out not to have been as hard to do as you might think. It works.
The over 40 included missions (counting those presented in Instant Action mode) spread across 5 different landscapes provide plenty of stuff to work with, and range in difficulty from Easy Enough for My Three-Year-Old to Fly to I Was in 'Nam and That Was a Cakewalk Compared to Mission 7 in Libya. Much has been done, both in single mission, campaign and multiplayer modes to give the player a sense there are both intelligent allies and dynamic opponentry present; the AI for the allies makes 'em plausible flying companions, for the most part, though they're still not always the self-starters you'd think Top Gun graduates should be during many missions (they lock 'n launch appropriate targets on their own, but take their own sweet time responding to player requests). The AI for the opponents, on the other hand, is consistently challenging, and scaled nicely across a wide spectrum of difficulty, so you can play the game at any level of experience you bring to it without being either bored or frustrated. The opponent performance in each particular mission has some randomness to it, so you can avoid the arcade-style trick of memorizing the sequence of the opponents' moves the last time around to beat 'em to the punch the next time through the same mission. You have the best of both static mission design and dynamic mission-generating mixed together, in other words, though the missions do generally initialize at pretty much the same starting point each time around.
The performance of the F-14 itself is quite believable, even in Simplified mode. Spectrum Holobyte remains the company out there to provide the right kind of air combat feel in their sims, and Top Gun isn't the least bit disappointing in this area of the design. Sure, certain things - like rudder control and instruments - remain simplified no matter what the settings for play, but they do the job for the sim as it stands. Those wanting a design with the kind of tweaking and fiddling depth of an F-14 Fleet Defender will have to wait until SpecHolo gets back down to the business of creating serious sims, hopefully in a hardware environment where Pentium MMX chips and a 3D graphics standard and 16-bit digital surround sound and dynamic instruction execution and all that finally offer the kind of equipment needed to do a real, serious sim right (a P5/166 under Win95's still a ways short of what real sim hotheads would like to see as their total heart's desire). Meanwhile, Top Gun offers perfectly plausible flight performance, and has the strength of most simulations focused around a single aircraft, i.e. the chance for the player to get that particular aircraft's idiosyncrasies in his/her bones as progress through the sim occurs.
The graphics in Top Gun continue the current trend of 3D schizophrenia: the terrain graphics, while more detailed in terms of actual 3D representation, are not what you'd want to rush out of your overheated New York apartment to Vermont to see come October - they're fuzzy at best, and you can almost hear the designers breathing a sigh of relief (on the fantastic voice track) when the terrain disappears under the clouds, leaving you up there with the other 3D objects and no terrain. On the other hand, the sculpturing of the individual 3D objects in the game - if you pause to take a look around at them - are nothing short of amazing, and are virtually photo-realistic up close. Too bad most air-air combat (the main focus of Top Gun) takes place with the opponent locked and targeted while s/he's a dot. Oh well, that's what the view keys are for.
Finally, as with one other current sim (Electronic Arts' ATF), the work done to provide dynamic voice participation through all the phases of the software - from movie, to training, to in-flight communications, to RIO commentary, to allied chatter, etc. - is astounding. You really have to maintain a sense of humor with this part of the design, as it's often pretty goofy, but when you realize just how varied and dynamic it really is, you'll be amazed at how responsive the "voice track" in the game really is to player action. I think we'll be seeing and hearing more and more about the importance of making the sonic portion of computer gaming and simulation as interactive as the rest of the design, and Top Gun really points the way here, along with ATF (the two are really neck-and-neck in this).
All in all, Top Gun comes as a very pleasant surprise, especially after a seemingly endless wait during which various kinds of speculation and company turmoil and fears of Spectrum Holobyte's trying to release something with lots of cut corners to make a profit fast off an unsuspecting, new and na∩ve audience all panned out to naught. It's clear that at the core, SpecHolo are still a company to trust in their commitment to pushing the cutting edge of air combat simulation design; the fact that they've taken on the multimedia/movie Trojan Horse haunting the computer gaming industry right now without unleashing a horde of screaming Trojans (read really annoyed gamers) suggests that if this movie thing is going to continue, we can expect Spectrum Holobyte to take on that challenge effectively as well in their future work.
Now all we need is Falcon 4.0 (and a Pentium MMX and a good 3D card). I can't wait.
