Reviewed: December 23, 2002
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Titus Games
Developer
Digital Integration
Released: October 28, 2002
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
6
6
5
5
5.6
Supported Features
It seems that every other game review that crosses my desk is a movie or TV licensed tie-in. Sometimes the games are based on new material (Ecks vs. Sever) and other times it’s based on material that is so old (Knight Rider) most gamers won’t even remember it.
Top Gun: Combat Zones is based on the still-popular movie, Top Gun that guys enjoy for the action scenes and girls get all warm and fuzzy for Tom Cruise and that volleyball scene. Admit it – after walking out of that movie what guy didn’t want to be Tom Cruise and what girl didn’t want to be with Tom Cruise.
When you license a movie it helps to actually tie the movie into the game in some fashion. Combat Zones fails to capture any part of the movie other than the title. They should have saved the money it cost to buy the Top Gun name and invested more time and money into the design of the game.
This isn’t the first attempt at a Top Gun game. There was a PC game a few years ago that captured the essence of the movie perfectly and even managed to deliver some authentic and exciting gameplay. This game opened with video footage of carrier launches and even had a cover of the “Danger Zone” song during the opening credits.
There is a lot of content in Combat Zones but most of it has no direction. You take part in 36 missions spanning three periods of time. You get to fly 5 of the Navy’s best fighters as you fly missions based in locations such as South East Asia, Gulf States, Arctic Circle, and the Miramar Base. All of these locations have some unique landscapes and scenery but none of this supports the weak game model at the core of this title.
Combat Zones looks and play like the older Ace Combat games on the PlayStation. Note that I said “older” as the most recent Ace Combat 4 was a stunning game that featured an involved story that took that franchise to new heights. Top Gun is a mishmash of missions tossed together that are totally unrelated. Despite the so-called Story Mode, there is no driving plot or epic feel to the game.
Admittedly, the game is arcade in nature so you can compromise and tell yourself that each level is just a new stage in a progressively difficult fighter game, but the more discerning gamer has come to expect more, even from an action title. There was simply nothing that grabbed me at the beginning or tried to keep me interested long enough to play this game to completion.
As we’ve all come to expect from games like this everything is locked down tighter than Area 51 when you first start this game. You get one plane to begin with and must unlock the other four plus the three bonus planes. You must complete the lengthy training missions before advancing to the campaign. Both the training and the main missions are straightforward with clearly defined objectives, but they just aren’t that fun. Shoot down all the planes, blow up the designated ground targets, and do it all in some impossible time limit.
Your performance is graded on several criteria; namely the time it takes to complete the mission, your accuracy, the damage you took, and any difficulty modifiers. Based on your score you will get gold, silver, or bronze medals. The award system is what the designers are hoping will keep you playing this game over and over in some demented quest for perfect gold. Some of these missions were so bloody hard I was happy to walk away with a bronze and never look back.
Control is pretty good. You are offered a Simple or Expert control scheme, but the only thing the Expert gives you is independent rudder control with the C-stick. This makes you slightly more maneuverable but doesn’t really change the way the plane flies or the difficulty of the game. The rest of your button commands include triggers for throttle and brake and buttons assigned to target lock, primary and secondary weapons fire. You can cycle through various weapons such as unguided rockets, heat-seeking missiles, and bombs. You can fire your cannon at anytime but dog fighting at Mach 2 is nearly impossible.
Top Gun is not all bad. There are a few surprises that managed to pop-up from time to time. The bombing missions are great fun. The camera switches to an overhead view of your plane with a target that skims the ground. You can dive down toward your target and drop your load then pull up in a high G climb. While most of the levels are sparse and generally uninteresting there are a few missions that surprise you with some unique terrain or interesting designs.
You have to love media hype. Here is a quote from the back of the game case. “Astounding and very detailed graphics especially in low level flying combat to emphasize ARCADE ACTION over mere piloting”. Allow me to translate with my own quote. “Lackluster visuals with a perpetual haze to conceal horizon pop-up and blurry textures that only get worse the lower you fly.” This game is barely adequate by Dreamcast standards, but is in no way using a fraction of the power the GameCube is capable of delivering.
The plane models do look very nice and are textured quite well and there is an excellent particle system that is used for explosions. You also have some nice weather effects and variable lighting conditions and the clouds are very wispy and quite realistic.
The HUD is very important to a game such as this and the one in Combat Zone is functional but still has a few problems that actually deters from the gameplay. The radar system is overly complicated and virtually useless. You have a compass bar at the bottom that shows enemies and their relative direction even before they appear on the radar map. You also have a circling arrow around your central display that points the way to your current target but none of these indicators give you altitude info, so you might be facing the enemy but they could be a thousand feet above or below you in some cloud and you will never know it. This was an issue in one of the earlier missions where you have to take out several wings of bombers, all at different altitudes. While this might be realistic, realism isn’t what we are going for in games that, “…emphasizes ARCADE ACTION over mere piloting”.
You can play Combat Zones from the cockpit (my preference) or a chase view. The camera will automatically switch to the bomber cam when you select bombs as your secondary weapon. There are pre-mission fly-bys and a few cinematics that indicate new enemies. All of the movies are generated with game engine graphics blending gameplay and movies perfectly. The movie will end with you in control of the plane at that very second. The pre-mission fly-bys will get very annoying since you cannot skip them and you are forced to watch them every time you replay a mission. In a game that is designed to have you replay each mission several times you should be able to skip the fluff and get to the action.
There is an excellent REPLAY mode that lets you replay the entire mission from several unique camera angles. This can be entertaining if you did something spectacular and want to relive the experience and check it out from multiple angles.
Apparently when you license the Top Gun name Kenny Loggins doesn’t come with the deal. You get none of those cool 80’s tunes that made the movie what it was. Instead, you get a handful of techno tracks and some guitar riffs that sound like a garage band auditioning for a bar gig. The opening music emulates the Top Gun theme but only in the most minimal of ways, almost as if they were trying to sneak around a copyright infringement.
The gunfire and explosions are adequate and the hiss of the plane is ok. Nothing really stands out as being exceptional and there is no surround mix giving the entire audio experience a very two-dimensional feel.
If you are sufficiently motivated by something other than the game it can take you 20-30 hours to complete the training and all 36 missions. If you want gold medals for all of those missions you can expect to be playing this game for a lot longer than that. The game is hard, the missions are challenging, and the requirements for gold medals border on being unrealistic.
When you have tired of the missions the designers have created you can go into the QuickStart mode and design your own sorties. Pick your plane (unlocked ones only of course), terrain, difficulty, and opponents and the game will generate a random mission based on your input. These random missions can often be very fun and rival those of the campaign game. It’s a nice feature that adds some extended life to the title.
I can’t recall a previous combat fighter game that didn’t offer a two-player mode, so I guess Combat Zones deserves some additional criticism for such an obvious oversight. To not include a split-screen mode so two or even four pilots can engage in aerial combat is unforgivable.
Right now the only thing Top Gun: Combat Zones has going for it is that it is the only combat fighter game available for the GameCube. It won’t take much to knock this title out of its niche genre. Meanwhile, if you own a PS2 or Xbox there are at least a half-a-dozen other games that will fly circles around this game.
If you are “feeling the need…the need for speed” then you may want to steer clear of Combat Zones and wait for the next fighter game to arrive. Even at a budget price this game may be stretching its value. Give it a rental if curiosity is getting the best of you, but you will probably agree that Top Gun: Combat Zones crashes and burns the moment you remove the shrink-wrap.