Top Gun puts iPhone and iPod Touch owners in the flight suit of a new recruit under the guidance of Maverick and Ice Man—you choose your own handle—who flies into the face of a new Communist threat. You’ll pilot your way into the danger zone in either a F-22 raptor or B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, with anthem master Kenny Loggins sonically guiding you through dogfights that may very well take your breath away.

Does Top Gun pass muster?

Loved
Flight Control: Shrewdly, Top Gun is a rails shooter (sorry, guided third-person experience) in which the developers set up “danger zone” patterns for you to barnstorm through (and avoid) laid over surprisingly rich environments. Danger zones – either an obstacle or enemy fire – tip you off to areas you don’t want to be, rather than relying on you spotting that canyon wall or carrier bridge upcoming. It’s good way to build this kind of a game on this platform, and the controls are matched well to the challenge, responsive without being too sensitive. Between missions you’ll probably shift your iPhone or iPod while you crack your knuckles, but recalibration is a snap and accessible through the pause menu. Flying is the point of this game, and the flying is fun.

Campy fun: I was going to bag on this game’s continuity. But it’s an iPhone game, the fact it has any story and continuity is more a positive than a negative. It’s still a bit weird to be flying modern-day combat aircraft (F-22s, B-2s) and still macho-talking about waxing Boris and the commies. Then again, Top Gun is, and always will be, classic Cold War propaganda. Take it in stride and the game will wink at you lots of times with humor that isn’t entirely unintentional. My favourite was a pre-mission briefing in which those bastard Soviets were sending a bomber after our carrier. (Really. A tactical high-altitude bomber. OK.) “Jesus!” says one of the pilots in your briefing group. “Jesus can’t fire an M61 rotary cannon at sixty-six hundred rounds per minute for us today,” says Maverick, who is now an instructor (with Iceman) at Top Gun.

Hated:
Repetition: The upside is the missions can be quite long, an achievement on this platform. The downside is that they can be quite long, too. You’ll fly different aircraft and meet different objectives, but it all comes back to evasive maneuvers and blasting unlimited missiles at endless waves of enemy aircraft. Mission failure means starting over from the beginning, making it extra agonizing when you screw the pooch with just 2 kills out of 30 left. The mission load times are, to be blunt, a pain in the arse, especially if you’re going back to clear a level you’ve been failing repeatedly. The between-missions dialogue, actually advances a story (albeit kind of hokey) but it’s OK and you can breeze through it. But the establishing-shot animations and the text dialogue at the beginning of missions just seem to get in the way of playing the game.

Putting together an arcade flyer with serious gameplay chops on the iPhone, and doing it with an existing IP, is a mean challenge. Freeverse handled it very well. I’m not sure I’d classify this as a casual game, which reflects credit on Freeverse for deepening the gaming experience in a new platform. On top of that, it delivers unlockables, some easter eggs and achievements, all for $US4. That’s a good value, and for all for all the campy dialogue and touches, Top Gun is still a very serious game.

Top Gun, for the iPhone and iPod Touch, was developed by Freeverse and published by Paramount Digital Entertainment. Currently available from iTunes store for introductory price of $US3.99. Played all missions on iPhone.

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There’s a man called Maverick and a guy nicknamed Iceman giving you orders as you fly missions under their tutelage.

There are fighter jets.

There is the song Danger Zone playing in the background.

The essential ingredients appear to be in last week’s iPhone release of Top Gun, a game developed by Freeverse and published by Paramount Digital Entertainment.

But some tweaks to the formula established in the 1986 Tom Cruise blockbuster had to be applied.

1) Players are required not to fly into the danger zone, but out of it. Ignoring the key lesson from Top Gun’s most famous song, gamers are supposed to tilt their plane so that it is never overlapping with any of the flashing Danger Zone icons that can appear in any of nine sectors of the iPhone screen. If your plane is in the Danger Zone, you need to get out of it. This was done because, well, development studio Freeverse needed to put a game mechanic in their game. Flying out of the danger zone is just that. It’s what you do to win at this game.

2) F-14s are gone. The signature plane of the Top Gun series is not in this game. Why? Freeverse senior producer Bruce Morrison told Kotaku: “We wanted to show that the Top Gun program has progressed but is still at the pinnacle of aviation.” So, no F14s. Instead, the player flies the modern F-22. (We failed to find out why Tom Cruise isn’t in the game, but it’s not surprising. The actor has not been featured in several games based on his movies).

3) There’s a Days of Thunder cross-over. What Tom Cruise did with fighter jets in Top Gun he did later with stock cars in Days of Thunder. Well, if you can’t have Cruise play Maverick, then you can have Cole Trickle, Cruise’s character in Days of Thunder, sub for Maverick. Paramount showed Kotaku that exclusive: punch in your player name as Cole Trickle, and you’ll be Trickle in the briefing room and you’ll fly Trickle’s car in the sky. Armed with guns and a cannon, of course.

Our Top Gun demo, it should be noted, occurred in a Paramount meeting room in Times Square. On the wall were posters showing scenes from other movies from the studio, including Titanic and Forrest Gump. They wouldn’t have put characters from those games in there too, would they?

I mentioned earlier this week the CBC’s misguided attempts at laying the blame of Brandon Crisps’ death at the feet of pro-gaming, and not society, his parents or Crisp himself.

The segment of Fifth Estate aired last night and is now available to watch on their website. It is as frustrating as you might expect it to be.

Top Gun [CBC]

Tony Scott was attached to Midway’s canceled Career Criminal game [Variety] [Pic]