Top Gun Preview [PSN]

Posted August 6, 2010 by Sinan Kubba.

Dave Wilson looks out from the DJ booth onto the union bar. He and I have drunk our weight in Snakebites. It’s 3am, and the dancefloor is empty. Dave sticks on a record before sprinting clumsily out of the booth. And behold, I did see a DJ making airplane arms to the Top Gun theme, all alone at his own disco. It was beautiful.

That is my abiding Top Gun memory, a memory impossible for anything, even the movie, to ever top. So I arrive at The Club at The Ivy, an astonishingly lavish building in the heart of Central London, with realistic expectations of the upcoming PSN Top Gun game on show today. Despite the glamorous location, doublesix’s Ollie Barder is similarly grounded about the flight game he’s co-designed.

“Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X had a ridiculous budget, right? Our budget wasn’t even a fraction of that,” he says, before chuckling softly as the in-game wingman lets out a rambunctious ‘Yeah! Death from Above!’

Thing is, doublesix’s goal with Top Gun isn’t to employ shiny voice-based technology or overwhelming visuals, although the game does have some arty-looking skies to soak into. Where Top Gun games have failed before, the studio is keen to ensure its game retains the feel of the film, from the cheesy lines to the daredevil piloting.

The single-player campaign pairs you with wingmen – Goose at first – and they’ll constantly crack lines like the one that made Barder chuckle. These will of course include some from the movie. The wingman serves as more than a one-liner generator, as you can order him to help out by taking down an enemy, defending you, and other actions via the d-pad. Barder assures that he’s a useful tool, and that while he can die he will take some beating first.

As for the daredevil piloting, Top Gun ostensibly plays like any other arcade flight simulator, but it does have an ace in the hole. That ace is CFI, which stands for Controlled Flight Instability. Triggered with the circle button, CFI lets you temporarily lock your camera to follow the nearest enemy as well as giving you some serious turning speed. This lets you pull off the kind of crazy twists, loops, and rolls that made Top Gun’s stunts so fun, but also ensures you keep your gunfire and missiles on target. But let’s face it: it’s worth it just for the showmanship.

While budget constraints mean there are no true cinematic cutscenes or any filmic likenesses, the game’s script is penned by one of the film’s screenwriters, Jack Epps Junior, and closely follows the plot of the movie. Playing as Maverick, you’ll spend the opening 30 per cent of the game in the Flight School before taking in the action of the Indian Ocean. With Epps Jr. on board there’s plenty of fan service on show, not forgetting the iconic Top Gun theme to enjoy (and whisk you back to drunken student discos) and the equally awesome ‘Danger Zone’.  It’s with a raised eyebrow that I discover both in-game songs are actually covers of the movie originals – I honestly couldn’t tell.

Barder takes me through one Indian Ocean mission in which he’s defending a naval base from a flurry of menacing Russian planes. He locks and takes down one Mig after another with a refined precision I don’t replicate later, almost making combination kills as he moves from one lock-on to another seamlessly. The scene looks impressively crowded, but Barder assures it’s but a teaser compared to later dogfights. When I do take the F-14 for a spin, the controls are much as I expected. They’re fluid and easy to pick up, although a slightly limited interface makes it quite easy to lose bearings. Then again, I am clearly a useless pilot. Maybe I would’ve done better with Saitek’s Aviator Stick, which the game supports, or by customizing the controls to closer suit my flight simulator background. Or maybe those are excuses.

To keep the combat simple and flowing, missiles and health are infinite and regenerate after a few seconds. Players can choose from six planes – three American, three Russian, the latter trio unlocked after completing the single-player campaign – and go with short, medium, or long-range missile setups. There’s also machine-gun fire, which is in itself quite powerful and a useful substitute for missiles in the right situation. There’s a radar display in the UI, worth mentioning because I see it get jammed in one mission by those nefarious Soviet types.

It’s in the online multiplayer where Top Gun will hope to earn its wings, though. There are five modes to play online with up to 15 others. There are the self-explanatory Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag modes – the latter intriguingly unusual for a flight game. The other two are Bombing Run, in which teams defend a bomber plane while trying to take down their opponents’ one, and Top Gun, which Barder openly compares to Gears of War 2’s Horde More – but for planes. Across the modes, players will earn ranks as they play more and more games.

The developer has kept the focus in Top Gun on keeping the play simple and accessible, but with the window for skill to be a factor in multiplayer through features like CFI. It’ll be through more extended time with the multiplayer that we’ll get an idea of the game’s true worth, though. Yes, I can safely say Top Gun is not going to be airplane-arms-at-3am amazing, but it might just prove a wily distraction this summer. Besides, it’s hard to not have fondness for a studio that made the single-player campaign’s final mission date match the film’s theatrical release date. Nerds.

Top Gun is set to arrive on the PlayStation Network on August 17th. A PC version is planned for a later date. Sorry, no. This has changed. Paramount Digital Entertainment, the game’s publisher, has now said the release date has been pushed back, but no updated date has been confirmed.