Top Gun is, of course, the game of the film, and as the official Paramount licence, it comes with all the famous characters - Maverick, Goose, Iceman and the rest - and the campaign pretty much follows the gist of the movie's plot, but with some additional material and twists.

Even some of the cut-scene dialogue is taken directly from the eighties film's script, with pilots' egos writing cheques their bodies can't cash, and cracks about being demoted to flying cargo planes full of rubber dog poop. However, at no point does anyone attempt to sing You've Lost That Loving Feeling, thankfully. We'd sooner eat the cargo load of rubber dog poop than listen to that again.

Before you can strap yourself in and tackle the campaign, there's some technical jiggery pokery to sort out on the ground, as it were. While this is a PC game, delivered via Steam, after booting it up we sat there nonplussed at the main menu as the keys did nothing, and neither did our joypad. Absolutely nothing at all; we couldn't even move the menu selection to check the controls under the options. It was akin to not even being able to get the canopy to our F-14 open. So off we toddled to the official forums, to discover a startling fact.

Top Gun on the PC requires an Xbox controller. You can't use any old joypad, only an X360 one, and there are no keyboard controls either. If you haven't got an Xbox - or if you have wireless controllers like us, with no adapter for the PC - you're a bit stuck. There is a workaround Xbox controller emulator on the Internet, which took us about half an hour of messing around to find and set up, so we got going eventually. However, the default control buttons this provided weren't ideal, and there's no way to change them.

So, the game wasn't off to a good start. Once you are up in the air, however, matters improve, and aside from the fact that we couldn't remap our buttons, the control scheme is nicely implemented. The flight model is simple enough to make this a very accessible game, with elements such as ordering your wingman tacked on as a simple stick push to get him to attack a target or defend your six.

The arcade flight physics means there's no worrying about stalling, neither do you have to be concerned with landing or anything technical like that. You're left free to concentrate on crazily banking around trying to get on that Russian plane's tail to unleash a volley of missiles.

Combat essentially boils down to keeping an enemy in your sights until you get the solid tone of missile lock, then letting them rip, while ejecting flares to distract enemy missiles as necessary. You can also use your machine-guns, and they're a necessity when a jamming plane or ship turns up to interfere with your radar and missile lock. Top Gun also has an extra piece of technological weaponry in its armoury called CFI or Control Flight Instability.

CFI is basically a combat aid button which gives you around ten seconds of what is more or less equivalent to 'bullet time' in a shooter. While it doesn't slow time down, it does make it much easier to target an evasive opponent by zooming the camera right back from the plane, while giving your aircraft extra manoeuvrability. This means you can quickly see exactly where an enemy is in relation to you, then twist acrobatically to swiftly target them. It might sound a bit strange, but it works well, although more hardcore simulation fans may not be overly keen on the concept. Or the fact that your plane's armour recharges about ten seconds after you've been damaged. Top Gun truly is an arcade style flight simulation.

And an entertaining one, at times, because while the campaign is short at just eleven missions, the cut scenes add some nice (if appropriately cheesy) flavour, and there are some satisfying sorties to partake of. Flying through a narrow desert canyon against the clock, flipping left and right while almost brushing the rock with your wing-tips is a definite highlight. Some of the other missions are a little more stock by nature - you're defending ships, then attacking them, then defending them - but there's usually a little twist thrown in such as having to fly below a certain radar ceiling.

While the single player mode is short, the multiplayer adds some much needed extra zip. This offers several deathmatch variants, along with capture the flag, and an objective led mode where teams have to blow up an enemy base while defending their own. There's a good variety of scenarios here, although the player base did seem a little thin on the ground (or should we say, thin in the air). Still, perhaps that will pick up with time.

Verdict
It's all a little cheesy, as you would expect, and the campaign is rather short, but otherwise Top Gun is a playable, cheap and accessible combat flight sim. One major bugbear, however, is the farce that is the control system, which requires you to have an Xbox joypad (or spend time fiddling to try to get an emulator workaround going). This is ridiculous in our opinion, although rumour has it the developer may be patching in keyboard support soon. We should hope so, alongside support for other joypads too, with any luck. If you haven't got an Xbox controller, we'd be inclined to recommend you wait until this has all been patched. Keep an eye on the official Steam forum for the game.

Company: Paramount

Tags: xbox iceman arcade game top gun paramount pictures video game games action