Top Gun has everything going for it: It’s just been released by Paramount, a game publisher with a good rep. Iron Man, another shooter-on-rails earned good reviews when Paramount released it in December 2008.
Top Gun is a game based on the always-popular Tom Cruise-breakthrough film of the same name—released in 1986—if you can believe it. For reasons that may have something to do with the release of the game into the App Store, the popularity of Tom Gun, the film, increased 16 percent last week on IMDB.
The Top Gun app also is a shooter-on-rails, a popular (maybe the most acclaimed) tech-style game.
Like most flying shooters, the object of Top Gun is to put your missiles’ or other weapon’s sights on targets and blast away. Your weapons fire from a thumb buttons on the right and left sides. Obviously, you want to dodge the bad guys at the same time.
You start as a new recruit and as you climb the stairway to the heavens, you get more lethal weapons in your arsenal and access to more challenging and interesting killing zones where you can work your magic.
All in all, it’s a conventional shooter-on-rails, but Top Gun is not run of the mill. The graphics are superb, even with the occasional video frame rate stutter. The soundtrack harkens from the film, so you get that “let’s rock and load” vibe that keeps you engaged. Top Gun’s use of the accelerometer is well implemented and responsive. For $2.99, you won’t find more bang for buck in this genre in the App Store.
Top Gun (the app) does have some cheesy parts. There are more than a dozen open screens of macho dudes yapping at each other about how the “enemy has become emboldened” and how it will be “nice to kick some commie [sic] tail.”
Like the movie itself, Top Gun’s special effects and soundtrack are worthy of Academy Awards nominations.
