Besides The Breakfast Club, Top Gun has to be one of my all-time favorite 80's movies. So, I'm sure you realize that after I heard Titus was making a Top Gun game for the PS2, I was ecstatic! After the 'just okay' Top Gun: Fire at Will, I was ready for a great Top Gun game - unfortunately, I'm still waiting.

The planes look great; there's no question about that. Many times I found myself switching to third person and 'bomber' modes just to look at my plane. The cities and environments, however could use a lot of work. From a distance, they look awesome, but once you get close to them, they don't look as spectacular. Thankfully, if you're this close to the ground anyway, you're probably about to die. There are a few nice effects used, such as cloud coverage, but that's about it. Explosions are nearly laughable and I'm still questioning why buildings don't smolder after you bomb the hell out of them. Actually, unless it's a 'main target' building, you will see no sign that missiles even hit the building. Instead of at least some smoke, the missile just fizzles out and doesn't even dent the thing.

There is quite a bit of fogging that tries to hide the horizon pop-up. Mountains just pop into existence right before your eyes. It's not as bad as Summoner, but it's just not attractive. The fogging also makes visually finding bogeys next to impossible, which you pretty much have to since the radar is not the easiest thing to use.

If you're expecting to hear 'Danger Zone' or the 'Top Gun Anthem', you will be disappointed. None of the music from the movie is used. In fact, the only real references I could find to the movie (other than the game's title) were that some of the songs were named after lines in the movie, such as 'Flying against a Ghost'. The machine gun, missile, and jet engines are good, but like everything else lacking.

You got a fighter-sim in my arcade game! You got an arcade game in my fighter-sim! The over all problem with Top Gun is that is doesn't really know what kind of game it wants to be and seems to feel content at straddling the fence between two game styles. For the most part, the game feels more like an arcade game with the timed missions and points, but then it begins to feel more sim-like when you look at arsenals and some aspects of the control system. Had the game just decided to be one or another, it would have done so much to improve the game as a whole.

After completing some of the hardest training missions I've ever had to do, Top Gun thrusts you into 30 missions spanning three combat eras over battle zones including South East Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. My main question while playing though was 'Why?'. The faceless Admiral who gives your mission goals does little to make you care about the fight. As bad as it was in some areas, this is where Fire at Will was great. The entire game was presented through the public's eyes in any war - TV COVERAGE! Had everything been part of some bigger mission, I would have enjoyed the missions more. It would have been nice to at least have that bald Admiral from the movie. I'm sure he's not doing much nowadays.

There's no other way to put it other than to say the missions are just poorly laid out. I could never figure out why I could not configure my plane's arsenal to suit each mission, like in the NES version of Top Gun. As it stands, the arsenal given to you just is not adequate to complete the missions and leaves little room for error. This limited arsenal is only compounded by the fact that just because you have missile lock, doesn't mean the missile will hit - even if it's a non-moving ground target.

Besides the Scenario missions, there is also a Quick Start mode which allows you to 'get to flying with minimum fuss' as the manual puts it. Basically, this is just a free fly mode where you set up what kind of planes, combat difficulty, and combat type on different mission maps. Just about everything in this mode has to be unlocked in the Scenario missions, so its kind of a bore unless you beat the game.

Top Gun is a strange anomaly. When I was playing through the training missions (something you have to do), I found this to be one of the hardest games I'd ever played. For example, the fifth training mission involves you dog-fighting two planes and you're only armed with machine guns - the clincher is that they are armed with machine guns and guided missiles. And if that wasn't hard enough for you, a nice five-minute time limit is thrown in. Every mission is timed, often leading to it being nothing more than a race against the clock. I can fully understand a mission clock, but to do what they expect in the little time they give you with the sub-par control scheme?

This is where things get strange. After I finally made it though Training, the following missions are fairly easy. While it could be argued 'That's because the training missions were so hard...', I beg to differ because after going back to play some training missions again, I still had a hard time completing them.

Again, control just kills the game. Four words could have easily fixed this problem as well: Fully Customizable Control Scheme. Getting used to the layout was more than half the battle and I am still not used to it. My main problem is with the placement of the rudder controls. In just about every layout you are given, they are usually on the shoulder buttons. This makes controlling your plane a hassle, especially when trying to brake or thrust. It would have been great to have the option to assign the control to the right analog stick (similar to the layout of Starfighter), instead of having it control looking around. Until you can get a decent grasp of things, expect to crash a lot.

I'm sure at this point I could probably go into a big rant about poor uses of movie license, but I'm not going to. Mostly because I would be speaking purely out of disappointment. I had high hopes for this game and it upset me that it didn't even come close to touching any of them. The only people I could really recommend this game to are the hardcore flight gamers, but for anyone else, even fans of the movie, you may want to look elsewhere.