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| Description | Review | |
![]() From Mar 96 issue |
Top Gun: Fire At Will
For years, flight sims have been getting more complex and more accurate. Here's one that does just the opposite and, for want of a better phrase, cleans 'em and fries 'em.
Persistent PC Gamer readers will remember Top Gun: Fire At Will from our April issue of last year. We spoke of a flight sim for beginners that would feature characters who'd ease you into the game by explaining how the controls worked, a navigator in the back-seat who'd look after some of the more routine flight sim operations, a rendered 3D base for you to wander around, and movie-style presentation that would join all the missions up into a story.
Now, after the sort of irksome delays which seem to beset every
flight sim, it is here. Some of the original ideas have been
dropped - including, thankfully, the part of the base where you'd
have to click on the cleaning lady's trolley to arm your plane,
or something. In-flight conversations are still in there, and
these, to their credit take place over the radio all throughout
missions.
They add plenty to the game and go something like this:
You: |
"I wonder what this button does." |
Merlin: |
"Splash one Bear bomber! Humpty Dumpty had a great fall! Yee hah hah! We got those suckers! Momma, spread the word!" |
You: |
"Pardon?" |
Strike: |
"What was that? Merlin, I didn't copy. Over." |
You: |
"I'm glad it wasn't just me." |
Merlin: |
"Strike, he means that the bandits have been destroyed." |
Stinger: |
"First cruise, kids. Both of you are RTB. That's return to base. Then you can write momma a nice letter telling her what it is to be in hack for a week." |
You: |
"So, er, what is it to be in hack for a week?" |
Merlin: |
"He's just kidding about that hack stuff, right?" |
You: |
"Eh?" |
And so on. You even get the odd movie joke, like when Raven says: "Merlin, how come you always speak for Maverick? Come to think of it, I've never even seen the guy."
The characters who are speaking
appear in a little window at the bottom of the screen, so you'll soon become intimately acquainted with
Strike (your commander back on the
carrier), Hawkeye (the AWACS aircraft
that provides everyone with a long-range radar image of your
surroundings), Raven (a woman pilot), Stinger
(another pilot), Hondo (the
cigar-chewing commanding officer who's the straight outa the
film, and who you'll remember for the TOP GUN line "Son,
your ego is writing cheques your body can't cash") and, of
course, Merlin (your back seat driver
from the film). And you, of course, are Maverick. All that's
missing is the facility to reply, Wing Commander-style, using
multiple-choice selections. But you'd probably only crash while
you were fumbling with the keyboard!
The dialogue is supplemented by another window in the lower-right
of the screen. This normally shows a close-up of your selected
target, whether it's flying about or spiralling to
the ground in flames. However, whenever anything exciting happens
elsewhere on the mission it automatically switches to that
instead. So you get to see the B-52s you're escorting dropping
their bombs on the enemy airbase, or your carrier launching an
anti-missile missile at an incoming Exocet, or a
formation of F/A-18s peeling away to "RTB". These are
all generated in real-time, too, rather than being pre-rendered
sequences, so you can rotate and zoom them just like the main
picture. And then, by means of the in-flight dialogue and video
clips between missions, the whole thing's tied up with a
storyline.
You begin at the Top Gun school,
as in the film, flying training missions against your chums with
the aim of scoring enough points to become "Top Gun".
Then it's into the campaigns, of which there are three. Each
mission starts off with a fairly standard-sounding briefing, but
things tend to get more complicated once you're in the air. (Continued below...)
"You feel genuinely under pressure, which you never do in a drier, more traditional simulation like SSI's Su-27."
Korea, for example. Your carrier is called in when the North invades the South, and you're sent on a patrol mission. A couple of baddies attack, and you head off in pursuit, but it turns out to be a decoy and a load more baddies come in from the other side. You beat them off, however, and, back on the carrier, you're commended and returned to the flight deck for another mission: bombers are heading for the carrier. On the deck awaiting the launch signal, you see Stinger getting attacked and shot down in the little window in the corner. You launch, knock out the missiles that the bombers have launched, and then shoot down the bombers and their fighter escorts. You're then diverted to Stinger's crash site, where Merlin picks up a strange radio message which doesn't seem to be in Korean. You return to the carrier again and, in more video footage, it's explained that Stinger was probably shot down by mercenaries. Then it's back up into the air to escort a flight of Intruders in a strike against the North (which is shown in the little window, of course). And so on.
Perhaps surprisingly, the upshot of all this is that, more so
than in any other flight sim I've played, in Top Gun you really
feel you're part of a mission. There's a battle raging all around
you, other pilots are counting on you, and everyone back on the
carrier is standing there with their fingers crossed. You feel
genuinely under pressure, which you never do in a drier, more
traditional simulation like SSI's Su-27. And, although the
storyline's pretty weak (salvaged only by a neat touch whereby a
mercenary called Nomad crops up from campaign to campaign), it
does give you a sense of progression. Even by Top Gun standards
most of the dialogue's horribly cheesy - if this approach to
flight sims is going to, er, take off, proper scriptwriters must
be summoned without delay - but at the same time it's
tremendously refreshing. I hope that one day all flight sims are
like this - even the more detailed, 'high-end' sort.
Compared with 'high-end' flight sims, though, Top Gun has had a
fair amount chopped out. It's been streamlined, if you like. You
don't have to switch on the engines, or arm your weapons, or plot
waypoints, or spend hours flying to the target area, and there are plenty of options for making
things even easier, including an auto-throttle that keeps your
speed at the optimum level and an autopilot that'll even fight
your battles for you, like the one in Falcon. Landings are
optional, and you can quit once you've achieved your objective,
but you can't beat a twilight carrier landing for rounding off a
mission. Su-27 fans will clearly be reaching for their soap
boxes, but, as someone who's played and enjoyed a huge number of
ultra-detailed flight sims, I honestly didn't miss having to
switch on my engines in Top Gun.
Just one second, aero-buffs might be thinking: The F-14. That's
the one that carries lots of missiles, including the Phoenix that
can shoot down a plane 60 miles away before you can even see it.
And having an AWACS feed in the cockpit will surely mean you can
see baddies from the minute they take off.
"Landings are optional, and you can quit once you've achieved your objective, but you can't beat a twilight carrier landing for rounding off a mission."
Challengely, some of the training missions force you into close-quarters dogfights by limiting you to guns only, and, during the campaigns, you'll have so many baddies coming at you that you'll swiftly exhaust your supply of missiles. (Unless you opt for unlimited ammo, of course.) Most importantly, though, the presentation I've just been describing ensures that, although there probably isn't all that much technical dogfighting per se, there's always something going on. And, with other friendly planes to think of, you can't just zoom around picking off baddies at your leisure. There are reconnaissance missions, too, involving whoosing low over enemy installations with AA exploding on all sides of you!
Looks-wise, Top Gun incorporates most of what you'd expect from a
modern flight sim. There are SVGA graphics (on our Pentium, at
least) with full texture mapping on all the objects. Your
airbrake pops up and down, your tail-planes waggle, your
undercarriage retracts, and water vapour streams off your wings
when you pull lots of Gs. There are lumpy hills; the canyon from
the film is properly reproduced, although rather
processor-cripplingly; and the clouds work quite well. Your
carrier is rendered in incredible detail, too, although it
brought our Pentium to its knees. The terrain does go horribly
chunky when you're flying low, though, and it'd have been nice to
have seen some stars in the sky at night.
Top Gun's a splendid game, basically. Although
MicroProse/Spectrum Holobyte is aiming it at flight sim novices,
it features ideas which should be incorporated into all sims,
however complex. With more convincing dialogue, a better way of
generating the landscape (something like Terminal Velocity would
be good, although perhaps I ask too much) and, perhaps, more
challenging campaigns (they all seem to start off really easy and
not put up any kind of a fight until about halfway through, which
is fine at the beginning but begins to tax my patience as I
became more proficient) it could easily become my favourite
flight sim.
Publisher - MicroProse/Spectrum Holobyte
Developer - In-house
Format - CD-ROM
Minimum System - 486DX, 8Mb RAM
Recommended - Pentium, SVGA
Sound Support - SoundBlaster
Release Date - 22nd February
The Verdict
An intriguing new direction
for the flight sim, and an ideal treatment of the film. I
approve.
88%
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| Description | Review | |