So you’d like to be Tom Cruise for a couple of weeks? Here’s your chance. MacSoft’s new flight sim for the Mac, Top Gun: Fire at Will, whisks you off to Top Gun Naval Weapons School in Miramar, California, where you’ll train against the best Navy pilots in the country.
A good story accompanies the action. Like Tom Cruise in the movie, you are Maverick, a gutsy pilot with more raw, natural talent than good sense. You and your radar man. Merlin, fly the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, one of the hottest combat fighter jets in the world, and you practice a wide range of recon flights and bomber escort duties, and engage in a screaming flood of killer close-quarters dogfighting.
But the star of this game isn’t the story, it’s the action. Top Gun is a curious hybrid, in a way. The game is an excellent introduction to the flight-simulation genre. It has all the rousing flight and fiiry needed to make it interesting to a newcomer, without bogging you down in the aerodynamic subtleties of the more complex flight sims. It may not be sophisticated enough for veteran game fliers, but there’s enough hot combat to keep even the most jaded jet jockeys hunched over their joysticks.
You get more than 40 fast and furious fighting missions on two CDs. You can work your way through the tough tutorial sessions at Miramar, learning the rules of air combat through intense and increasingly difficult training exercises. Or you can plunge right into hot global warfare by selecting Instant Action, a collection of 30 or more fighting scenarios scattered around the world.
One of these Instant Action offerings is a wild and woolly entry called Endless Enemies. You get your choice of eight battle sites, including Cuba, Korea, Libya, Miramar, and even the Grand Canyon (a tough place to fly). No matter which location you choose, you’ll face wave after wave of enemy aircraft. You can’t win this one. They’ll keep coming after you until they shoot you down or you abort the mission. Then you’ll get a score to show how well you did — points for every enemy plane you destroy, minus points for every missile you fire (just to keep you from blasting away indiscriminately).
The graphics are somewhat inconsistent. Many details are nicely rendered — planes, missiles, clouds, seashores, and aircraft carriers. But the terrain graphics can vary from the gorgeous crags and channels of the Grand Canyon to pixelated brown and green sludge in some of the flatter areas. The background music comes from Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” rerecorded from the Top Gun movie soundtrack; it’s nice for a while, but it tends to get repetitious over a long course of fighting.
There are some neat extras packed into the game. A View Object device lets you take a close look at friendly and enemy aircraft. Not only do you get a written description and a voice-over narrative detaiUng each aircraft’s characteristics, but you also can rotate the aircraft and change the pitch to help make later visual identification easier.
So climb into Tom Cruise’s G suit and fire up your afterburners. If you’re new to flight sims and need a solid introduction to the genre. Top Gun may be just what you’re looking for. It certainly won’t bore you.
Lee, Tom. (July 1998). Top Gun: Fire at Will. MacAddict. (pg. 64).
Spectrum HoloByte
Games
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2014-07-04 / 
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TopGun_CD2.toast_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
