iPhone Game: Top Gun
Your emotions will soar and tumble around as you crank up Top Gun for a gaming session, fuelled by memories of the 1980’s film. You’ll soar with anticipation as the music starts, as you kick off the first, training level, with the absolutely stunning 3D-modelled aircraft carrier video sequence, but I’m afraid it’s mainly downhill from then on, with Top Gun at best a fast-paced arcade reaction-fest and at worst a travesty of the flight sim genre.
There are so many things wrong with Top Gun that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s start with the factual inaccuracy of having F-22 Raptors on an aircraft carrier (the Raptor isn’t a naval jet) - why on earth couldn’t models of the film’s F-14 Tomcats have been used? It’s not as if there’s any detailed flight modelling going on, after all. In fact, there’s isn’t ANY flight modelling - you can’t crash, do aerobatics or even, staggeringly, fly in a particular direction. This is strictly a game on rails - which isn’t a compliment for a flying title!
After some cutscenes using characters from the film, you’re thrust into flying action, with the main aim being to swerve the jet up and down, left and right in order to avoid ‘danger zones’ (remember that song fragment from the film?) popped up on a 3×3 grid on-screen. This arcade element might work OK if it wasn’t for the fact that the controls are reversed from every other aircraft game you’ve played in your life. To roll the F-22 left, you have to tilt your iPhone right. To roll right, you have to tilt the device left. See where I’m going with this? The developers would argue that this behaviour is because of the way tilting left makes the on-screen plane graphic move to the left in the camera view, but everything about it just screams ‘wrong’.
In addition to dodging ‘danger zones’, you get to shoot bad guys of course. This being Top Gun, you’d expect screaming fast turns and trying to outwit the opposition through sheer flying ability. Sorry. All that happens here is that bad guys queue up (literally) to appear in front of your gunsight in order to give you something to shoot at. There is no element of dogfighting WHATSOEVER. Oh yes, and you have unlimited ammunition, so you can fire and fire and fire…..
All the efforts of the visuals team (carrier, gunships, landscape, sky effects, explosions and more) are unfortunately all reduced to the level of a simple dodge left/right/up/down arcade game. And even here Top Gun manages to mess up, moving from the trivial training mission to a slightly harder ‘mission 2′ to a ‘throw danger zones and bad guys to shoot at you faster than you can blink’ mission number three. When a game becomes so frantic that you, essentially give up, with seven of the ten missions not even glimpsed, then something’s wrong with the balance of the gameplay.
By all means buy Top Gun for the super stereo music soundtrack, by all means buy it for the nice visuals, by all means buy it for a little frenetic arcade action. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a flying game, let alone a flight simulation.
This is a painting program written by Lim Ding Wen, a 9 year old iPhone developer living in Singapore. This program is designed specially for his sisters and all the kids in the world.