This game teaches combat. No points for second best.
Dismissed.
Moviefans, parents and old schoolers. Like me, many of you grew up watching the movie Top Gun and remembering the film brings us a great nostalgic trip: Fast, adrenalinic jet action accompanied by an action inducing soundtrack which is what most of us we remember if we were among the people who watched the movie as kids.
Top Gun's impact on pop culture goes beyond quoting lines, several references can be found on TV shows and movies like Captain N: The Game Master, Family Guy, Hot Shots! and even videogames like the Borderlands series. The latest nods to the movie (and its upcoming sequel) are the Hyperdimension Neptunia shmup Dimension Tripper Top Nep and the game which I'll review right now: Top Gun Air Combat by Pix Arts.
'Til I make you, take me, on your Mighty Wings.
Make you, take me, on your Mighty Wings across the sky!
Before playing the game, the first option is to pick one of the three available aircraft: The Boeing/McDonnell Douglas F/A-18A Hornet, the Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor or the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II.
It's kinda odd that a game hooking up on the name "Top Gun" doesn't use the F-14 Tomcat and the A-4 Skyhawk as selectable planes.
They thought the country name of Chile could be translated.
Error number 37 in the list of "Machine Mis-Translations".
After selecting your aircraft, you're given the choice of selecting the starting stage.
For some reason, the game translates Chile as "Chili" and Libya as "Lybia". There's Engrish in this game despite is not a Japanese game: "Minmap" instead of "Mini-Map" and "Failured" instead of "Failed", so we can say this game is the Blazing Star of flight simulators.
I guess the idea was to replicate a Thrustmaster on the PlayStation 4 controller.
...an OLD Thrustmaster from the 90's.
One of the main apsects of a flight simulator is one thing: Control. You need a fully functional interface where all of the buttons are used for all the vital functions of the aircraft from speed and flight control to weapons and countermeasures. This game ditched them away and relies on a somewhat basic layout that it might have worked on a SNES game like Super Strike Eagle, but not in a next generation console like the PS4 or the Switch. While most games utilize the L2 and R2 to reduce and increase speed, this game uses them for the bullets and missiles, which feels more like a First Person gun game.
In the "Danger Zone" of bad controls.
With all said and done, let's go "Right into the Danger Zone" of this game which is the gameplay. Top Gun Air Combat's gameplay is a flight simulator which nods the Ace Combat series, although its more "Arcade like" since there's no mission objectives to clear. Just take down a certain number of enemy fighters pretty much like Sega's G-LOC Air Battle. For an "Arcade" based game, there's no ending to the game since the game will select the next levels at random. To put an example you can start the game on Lebanon, then the game moves to Beirut, Chile, France, Chile again, Ukraine, Emirates, etc. Another point of being an Arcade based game is that you don't have to choose the jet's weaponry, the game sends you with the standard missiles and the AAM's which can lock on 4 targets or slam 4 of them on a single enemy. You have a machine gun, but unlike the Easy and Normal levels of Ace Combat, your ammunition is limited, and there's no Return Line to resupply, so if you cross the border of the combat zone you have 9 seconds to return or the mission will fail. There's no damage indicators, but you can take a few missile hits before having your plane on fire which will be your indicator of damage, but your plane "Self-repairs" as long as you don't get hit like the Shield in a Halo game. For some strange reason, when you complete the mission you can still fly freely as long as you don't press the X button, a sign of a lazily programmed game.
All of these elements of the game could be fun if it wasn't for the problems that plague the game. If you thought the button layout was already strange, the controls are a critical hit to the gameplay as the jet control feels broken most of the times, as if it was a badly calibrated joystick combined with terrible inertia. Something like turning could be a chore This is fatal if we compare this with Ace Combat's more complete controls and a much finer and solid handling. Maneuvering your jet is not just horrible, but incomplete as well, since there's no flap control to slowly make a turn or being unable to use chaff or decoys as countermeasures, forcing the player on go full throttle to escape from a potential enemy missile impact. To close things, if you die once it's Game Over and you have to play all the way back to mission 1. Also, there's no Multiplayer, neither online or local couch co-op, so there's no "Playing with the Boys" here.
Of all the console and PC releases, the PlayStation 4/5 release is the only one with Trophy support. You just have to survive five missions and you'll unlock everything: 6 Bronze, 4 Silver and 1 Gold trophy are all this game will have to offer for your suffering.
RIDERS IN THE SKY ACROSS THE UNIVERSE!
We've already reached the point of NO REEETUUURN
Riders in the Sky flying through space and time.
TO RISE AGAIN...BEYOND THE HORIZON LINE!
Here's a final oddity: While in Ace Combat, your jet stalls after reaching 30,000 feet high, in Top Gun Air Combat the jet can reach the double and even beyond and it will never stall. This rivals the infamous "Infinite Reverse Speed" and the "Gray Void" from Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing altogether. Does this Top Gun pilot is heading to the Danger Zone or is "Going Interstellar"?
So this game wasn't meant to be Top Gun? Damn you guys!
What's next, a bad racing game using the name "Days of Thunder" to trick NASCAR fans?
Looks like we've fell on the infamous trick of "Shameless Renaming". The game was originally released on PC as Air Gun Fighter, but for its re-release on Switch, PlayStation 4 and XBOX One was rebranded as Top Gun Air Combat, probably since the console ports were released anticipating the release of Top Gun: Maverick and were looking for a quick profit on the naive old men and oldschoolers who might fell for it. Looks like Pix Arts is really in the "Danger Zone" since they're not just using Top Gun's name which could get them problems with Paramount, but also Air Combat (Namco), the name of the first Ace Combat game, add to the list the unlicensed use of the Hornet (Boeing), Raptor and Lightning II (Lockheed Martin), this game is really asking for a lawsuit from different fronts (Remember what happened with After Burner Climax and the "Corporate Crybaby" whinery of Boeing and Northrop Grumman?).
You can view the action even under the wings, just like in the movie.
Graphically, the game looks pretty decent in the jet design as it feels almost on-par with Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, while the PC and Switch versions seems to have an unrealistic dark brown color for the three jets which hide some details, including the cockpit, the PlayStation 4 port has the aircraft with a more realistic color. The scenery while it has some geography, it lacks some minimal, but key details that improve the textures used like 3D buildings, and the surface texture look quite a bit like and HD remastering of Sierra's Pro Pilot 2000 it looks like a blurry overpixelated as you get close to the ground, but on a certain altitude, it looks like a satellite view. The in-flight status display clearly mimicks that of the Ace Combat games, but the fonts are "Way too Arial" for a HUD computer, just have a look to Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown and Airforce Delta Strike to understand what I'm talking about.
As for the storyline, there's no plot mentioned in the game, but the online stores description mentions the "United States and their allies VS Russia" war, and you as a Top Gun pilot you're sent with America's finest fighters and that's all you need to know about the game's plot.
The sound department just "Lost that Lovin' Feeling" as soon as you run the app, since there's no music. Only the jet engine noise, radar locks and firing weapons, like the Angry Video Game Nerd said on his NES Top Gun review "If purgatory exists, this is what it is". There's no dialogues within the game, even the "Operation Katina" from Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War was more "alive" than this game.
If you're going to play this game, here's a small playlist.
Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone
Cheap Trick - Mighty Wings
Two-Mix - Maximum Wave
Eclipse - Love Bites
Dragonforce - No More (feat. Matt Heafy)
Metallica - Fuel
Eclipse - For Better or For Worse
Kenny Loggins - I'm Free (Heaven Helps the Man)
Cain's Offering - Constellation of Tears
P.O.D. - Boom
Metallica - Prince Charming
TOP GUN'D FUN CURIOSITIES
- The game share's the same name as the mobile game Top Gun: Air Combat by MOBI/MoGame.
- Truetrophies "fell for it" 'cos they added this game to the list of Top Gun games as if it was an official movie-related game.
- The use of the F/A-18A in a "Modern World" game like this is out of place for the 2020's due to its retirement and replacement with the F/A-18E Super Hornet.
- The F-35 appeared in some official Top Gun games and media, like the DLC exclusive in Top Gun: Hard Lock, and it was rumored to be the "flagship" jet for Top Gun: Maverick during the early development until the first teaser poster revealed the Super Hornet as the F-14's replacement.
Indeed, Nina.
This isn't the Danger Zone, they lied to us.
Top Gun Air Combat/Air Gun Fighter has a lot of potential to compete with Namco's Ace Combat series as we have a flight simulator with decent-to-good graphics. But suffers of several flaws, being the controls the worst of all, along with the lack of music and dialogues and that shameless obvious renaming in an ill-fated attempt to cash on the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick. I wouldn't be surprised if the game is pulled down the stores because of its name just like it happened with Takotan: Hoshi no Tako when it was released as Octonaut. But since the game is an infringement on more aspects than just using Top Gun or Air Combat's name, It's more than sure it would be removed.
If you're planning to get it for a quick trophy boost for your PlayStation 4 or 5, then do it, suffer with the bad controls until you get everything and uninstall it. It's not the Danger Zone you're looking for, but at least fulfills its purpose for a short while as you take the trophies. To put it simple, this game makes me wish Top Gun: Hard Lock was backwards compatible.
The Lea Scale "took a hit" this time.
Sucks when they play s#@! with something you like.