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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:

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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