Top Gun: Combat Zones

After playing Top Gun on NES, I found several other games. This is the second one in the franchise. I thought it would be an improvement, but nope. This game feels more like an Ace Combat rip-off due to the poor grasp of the source material. What doesn't help is that it was made by Titus Interactive, a company known for being bad.

The graphics are poor, even for the 2001 standards. Seriously, this game looks like it was made in the mid-1990s The models of the tanks and the buildings look very blocky and the textures are incredibly blurry, specially on the PC version, and if this wasn't enough, you can't change the graphical settings on the PC version, you're only limited to change the resolution. It's worth to mention that the draw distance is also poor, as most of the levels are covered with fog. The visual effects like the smoke and the explosions after a target is destroyed are lazily done, also, for some reason some of them just disappear out of nowhere instead of showing up their destroyed models. Speaking of PC, surprisingly, the PC version runs very well on modern resolutions and operating systems, something that is rare in old PC games.

The sound design is poor. The best example of this are the weapons, the gatling gun sounds like the firing sound of those space shooters from Action 52 and the sound that plays when you're aiming at an enemy is so high-pitched that can make your ears bleed. The soundtrack is generic and will get very repetitive after a few minutes, also, it doesn't even fit well to the game's pacing, as some songs seem to be taken out of a puzzle game. While some of those songs are quite generic and repetitive, there are other ones that are actually good and catchy. The main theme of the game, for example, is very awesome.

The missions are repetitive. You only destroy a certain number of ground and air targets per level. The only thing that differentiates the levels are the backgrounds and the level design, but they don't really change at all and none of the levels are memorable. The objectives are often boring and troublesome to complete due to your plane's lack of maneuverability and low ammo pool of your weapons; for example, to destroy a base you must destroy every single building in the level, but this can take a lot of time because of the aforementioned problems.

In one of the missions the briefing explicitly tells you to fly low and fast through the city, something that you must never do with a jet fighter. That actually happened in real life once, at a sports stadium, when the American National Anthem was performed, military jets flew low over the stadium, some of them really close it was very intense and deafening. Performing an action like that can cause you to be booted from active service. Also, one of the academy mission's briefing lies. Your objective is to protect friendly buildings from enemy tanks, and you're told "you can afford to lose one building but no more than that", but you actually fail if even one building goes. This annoys me a lot, making the game rather impossible to complete.

There are no technical differences between the jets available, they don't have more ammo, more health or a better maneuverability. They're just there to add some "variety" to the game. Also, your weapon loadout for each mission is predetermined and can't be modified, something that can be critical in certain levels where you need to destroy a lot of ground targets. In fact all of your weapons are incredibly unreliable and poorly programmed:

• The autocannon is very weak and takes too many hits to damage your objectives.
• The air-to-air missiles can kill the airborne targets in one hit, but they barely home into the targets and you need to shoot them at point-blank range to make an efficient use of them.
• The air-to-ground missiles are even more imprecise than the air-to-air missiles because they have troubles with targets that are too close to the ground like tanks and buildings.
• Rockets are hard to use. Unlike the other missiles, the rockets won't home into the enemies, you have to land your rockets with your crosshair, something that can be very difficult if you're too far away from the target.
• The bombs are the only weapons that work properly, unfortunately, you only have a limited amount of them per level and they don't have a really big splash damage.
• None of the missiles have splash damage, if one of the missiles don't mark a straight hit, the target will not get damaged.

The ground targets are so tiny that you can barely see them from above, and due to the poor graphics, they can blend in with the ground very often. Some of them can be a real headache because of the perfect aiming of their weapons, and while they don't do a great damage, they can still drain your health very fast. Besides the perfect accuracy of their weapons, most of them will never try to evade you, specially the enemy jets, they just seem to ignore you and sometimes they won't even try to take you down.

The controls in the PC version are incredibly sensitive if you try to use a gamepad and there is no way to adjust the dead zones of your joysticks, meaning that the plane will handle terribly if the joysticks of your gamepad are damaged. Despite the poor plane maneuverability, the controls are pretty easy to get used to and there aren't many issues with them.

If you love the movies, you'll probably enjoy this game. But I almost didn't because of the fake difficulty.