Since the 1987, just the year after the release of the motion picture Top Gun began a tradition of movie based games based off this hot property one hit wonder from Paramount Pictures. Having seen game releases across everything from the NES and early various computers on the market, to current generation consoles like the Gamecube and Playstation 2, and even into the handheld realm to on Gameboy Advance the franchise has seen multiple outings. While all these games used the name Top Gun, none really have to date even attempted to bring anything to the table having anything to do with the movie other than capitalizing off the namesake. Only making matters worse aside from not trying to really use the license, all these titles were pretty bad, a couple mediocre at best. While this may or may not fair well for the recent release for the Nintendo DS, I encourage you to read on and see if this one finally does ‘Ride into the Danger Zone.’

Presentation
Top Gun for the Nintendo DS attempts to capture the feeling of the movie unlike the past outings the franchise has been subjected to. Upon turning on the game for the very first time as the opening screens roll towards the title you will be greeted by the Top Gun theme song, and a title screen with a sharp image of an F-14 Tomcat on the deck. While some may want to mock this game like the past titles for failing to grab the feel of the movie, in my eyes with what the source material allows Mastiff did a fair job. Small comments will come in the form of the pre-flight menus, or the rare comments during combat where material will be sourced from the movie to add a nice touch, but in the end it is add-in filler. Ultimately this is a flight combat game, and that is what you will find plenty of in this title, so unless you were looking for a drunken karaoke night, date the instructor mini-game, or some boring classroom time to truly give you the Top Gun feel you may want to look somewhere else. The menu system to this game is pretty clean cut and simple to navigate with either the stylus or just the buttons on your system, so sadly the stylus usage is a useless addition to the game that will be hardly missed. Just as the menus are simple static so are the rest of the texts, in flight chatter, and head shot images of people you converse with in combat. It is obvious to me that where the effort of this game went into was not the little things, but the in flight engine of the game.

Visually speaking Top Gun is a decently solid package of 3D visuals upon entering the combat zones of the game. While as I had mentioned that the menus and other displays are all simple 2D imagery, it seems much of the artistry efforts went into the worlds you will fly your combat craft around in. Each of the 3D items of the game whether it is a small SAM site, your aircraft carrier, wingmen, enemy aircraft and more are all detailed pretty well and are easily distinguishable. Some nice small touches went into the visual package of the game which I think help make it stand out and show just a bit more effort. When going on full afterburners in your aircraft the visuals of the game will blur and contort in a tunnel vision type display to give you a greater sense of speed, and even little things like the folding of the swoop wing design wings of the F-14 are present. I imagine though that these attentions to detail came due to the fact that aside from the 3D objects in the game the rest of the 3D package is highly sterile and of quite low detail. Whether over land, sea, or up in the clouds, all the imagery is completely static which somewhat cheapens the experience when you have painted on waves and clouds that don’t move at all. The terrains are not all the details that truly lack in this game, as also all the destruction animations are very cheap and minimalist. Enemy ships that are sunk don’t even smoke, they just slip straight down, and aircraft have a teeny pop and a fizzle of smoke trailing down after them. Visually the game while making a nice effort in the designs of the objects in the space are noteworthy, all the rest around it show a general lack of effort put into finishing the job.

The audio of this package I supposed would be best and simply put as exactly complimentary to the visual end of this game. The audio is present, and in some cases quite notable but in the end, it’s just an afterthought and does anything but stand out. Of all things the only great bit of audio the game bothers to give you is the Top Gun theme from the start up of the game, and it is plateau that will never be achieved again. I am not in any way saying that the musical score of this game is bad as it is not, it’s just that the accompanying guitar riff pieces offered are so easily forgettable that you will not even consciously notice blocking them out of your mind as you’re flying. Sound effects given to the player in the game are pretty decent, but if I didn’t know any better I’d say they came off a stock audio samples collection. You have your acceleration and deceleration sounds, machine guns, rockets, missiles, overly simple explosions, and so on down the line. It is best said that the sound effects in the game are neither good, nor bad; they are just present and accounted for. Rounding out the audio package are a handful of well sampled clearly spoken recordings of com chatter from your wingman depending on the situation in the sky, but usually of the very few there, the one you’ll hear so much you’ll want to see the guy get shot down is the guy hollering “He’s got a lock on me!” time and again throughout every mission. I found myself annoyed enough at times where I couldn’t block it out and would mutter, “Die already,” and sadly he never did.

Gameplay
As is the root of any game making the claim to be a Top Gun title, gameplay has to be key and well executed in a dog fighting arena of combat. Dispelling any ideas that this game is either quite good or bad in this respect I will let you know that overall the experience is quite adequate and gets the job done. Top Gun has a few modes at your disposal which are: Campaign, Free Flight, and Multiplayer at your disposal. In Campaign mode you get to play as either Maverick, Iceman, Jester, or Slider from the original movie. I for one during my test run of this game used Maverick to see if the mode tried to stick to the movie in the least bit, and I found that the story around the missions lightly did attempt to do just that. This mode has you play out that mode as one of the four guys, but it didn’t really matter who you used as it didn’t affect gameplay in any way at all. The next mode called Free Flight is an interesting mix of the ability to replay missions, and the ability to fly some bonus stages as well. Confusing enough to me though is that the replay of old missions seemed completely useless as this is already open within the Campaign mode of the game. Finally the game also comes with Multiplayer mode which allows up to four people to play either on single or multiple DS game cards. With multiple game cards you can setup a game where the host can choose a battle arena, mission time, frag counts, and all players can choose their own craft. The single card mode is nearly the same but more limited due to the constraints of the data transfer between the DS’s.