It is in my nature to be curious, and when a Steam sale put this title for $2.5 U.S. dollars I decided to give it a chance.
Top Gun is a game that flies only by the big franchise game, and has little else going for. The graphics are stale and feel not only old, but poorly executed. Textures are of low quality, airplane models lack detail and there is so little variety of them that the world feels constrained, belittled.
The controls were created for the Xbox 360 controller -an obvious fact once you see a picture of it in the control settings section-, which leaves the keyboard with the uncomfortable job of poorly simulating joystick movements. There is no mouse movement, which only adds to the clunky experience.
The missions are a repetitive set of "go to point X to destroy target" or "escort designated vehicle to safety", and offer no replay value. Throughout the game you'll find conversation scripts taken out of the movie... sort of. The lead character (Maverick, that is you) never talks, which leaves the job to poorly done voice-over re-enactments of the film, and it translates to a disastrous game experience.
The game takes you to an arcade experience which leaves all expectation of simulator behind you: airplanes can do impossible maneuvers, gun ammo is unlimited and missiles have a cooldown (but are, otherwise, unlimited as well). There are no minigames to land the plane after the fight, (unlike the N.E.S. version) and you start every assignment on the air. Fuel is unlimited too.
None of which should be considered inherently wrong: you can have all that and still be fun as hell; my problem with Top Gun is that it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be. You do not see mission briefings or mid-game cutscenes in arcade flight titles like After Burner: they are all about high speed chasing and the sense of speed, none of which are present in here.
Not recommended.
