Top Gun: Hard Lock (PS3)

When you’re flying highly maneuverable jet planes that can break the sound barrier, a dog fight can end up a somewhat chaotic affair. Even locking your missiles onto a target won’t be an easy task, and oftentimes some compromises need to be made so that shots can land or foes can’t avoid every shot from your aircraft’s weaponry. However, Top Gun: Hard Lock manages to find a way where it can keep that exhilarating speed but still make it possible to take down your targets even though they’re moving with as much speed and freedom as you are, and that’s through the game’s titular Hard Lock mechanic.

When battling another jet in the air, you can try to shoot them down with your machine guns or try to line up a lock-on for some guided missiles, but there are even counters for having a homing rocket on your tail by dropping flares at the right time or making the right movement in a small window. You can still take down foes and the damage you inflict during this free flying can add up, but if you can get behind the tail of another jet in this aerial action game, you can press Square to initiate the Hard Lock. Here you and the other aircraft are now locked in a chase, because no matter how the two move, the jet in the back will be adjusted to stay on their target’s tail. During this section it’s much easier to hit with the guns, but locking your missiles onto a foe is the main challenge since it can often be an instant kill if pulled off. The enemy can see your lock-on reticle during a Hard Lock though and their main objective is trying to stay flighty enough to avoid it, and after a while there will be a chance for a change of fortune. A flashy maneuver like a barrel roll, Immelmann turn, or Cobra activates where you need to put in the directions shown on screen with the control sticks with the right timing. If you fail to pull it off, the Hard Lock reverses and now you’re the one in the enemy’s sights, but if you get it right, the lock-on reticule for the homing missiles is now much larger and harder for the enemy aircraft to avoid.

While some of the maneuvers do get a little repetitive over time, the Hard Lock system is a great boon for the game’s aerial battles, especially since the action in Top Gun: Hard Lock doesn’t just boil down to using them exclusively. In the game’s campaign mode you will play through 14 normal missions plus a bonus mission with an interesting new perspective on an earlier level, Top Gun: Hard Lock in general having a good sense for how to vary up its jet-focused action. You’ll definitely spending most of the time firing at other jets in the air, but missions can involve things like trying to dodge radar by avoiding structures or certain elevations while taking down targets, attacking bombers and signal jamming aircraft, and trying to manage ground and aerial battles at the same time. A ground force might be making an incursion into the city and you have to make sure they survive while the air above is filled with enemies trying to take your attention towards them as they threaten your own safety, or you might have tanks coming in from multiple directions to assault a pipeline and figuring out how to drop your own bombs to manage them will avoiding anti-air makes for a period that feels much different from Hard Lock battles in the sky. In fact, while the Hard Lock system is a comfortable way to ensure most kills, it also takes more time than trying to find other ways to take down targets, other pilots sometimes helpful in keeping a target busy so you can land your shots.

Top Gun: Hard Lock does start off rather safe and comfortable but soon gets a good sense for how to challenge the player’s ability to split their attention and manage resources. The checkpoint system usually lets you start at the beginning of sections where you need to effectively handle multiple hostile forces, meaning if you do make the wrong judgment calls or end up with an embarrassing immediate death by crashing you can get back in and try and implement a better plan, and near the end such plans really do become important. Mission 13, Air Supremacy, cranks up the difficulty quite a bit as multiple time sensitive tasks strain your ability to deal with the foes who shoot at you during them, but building up your attack run to be optimal and safe extracts a lot more strategy out of your action and ensures that even when you’re getting foes into Hard Locks you’re doing it as a strategic choice knowing its advantages and disadvantages. Later missions can even feature certain plane types where Hard Locks are the worse choice for tackling a certain enemy type and figuring that out is another part of the game’s enjoyable balance in providing you a tool for greater accuracy but not undermining the difficulty in the dogfights.

Top Gun: Hard Lock’s campaign also find a good way to bring in the expected references to previous Top Gun media without it dominating the story it’s now telling. While no one ever leaves the cockpit across the plot, you will encounter characters from the 1986 film in an appropriate capacity and the game gives you a first taste of the expected Top Gun Anthem before dishing it out more sparingly in later levels. The rare but fairly simple aircraft landing sections could even be a bit of a reference to the NES Top Gun’s infamous landings and they definitely go smoother here without being just short of automatic. The story itself though centers around a character with the nickname Spider who trained at the Navy’s TOPGUN aerial combat academy and is now starting his service by participating in a conflict in an unspecified region of the Middle East. Missions will shift between the current battle against a terrorist group in the Persian Gulf and those missions back at TOPGUN, the flashbacks mostly introducing new mechanics as you get new jet fighters with varying weapons and abilities. These segments also work to build up the supporting cast, perhaps the most important being his rivalry with his old flame Fury, but it is rather easy to get attached to the whole crew even if they’re not fully developed partly because having them arrive to provide back-up in a mission does have an appreciable impact and you can feel their absence if something happens to them. Huckster’s anti-war sentiment do feel a bit out of place when the rest of this game is so gung ho about these military operations, it almost feeling like a little lip service to the unpopular Middle Eastern conflicts of the real world so that Top Gun: Hard Lock can’t be labelled entirely tone deaf.

The campaign is an exciting ride even when its challenge level starts to skyrocket near the finale, but the Danger Zone mode is perhaps a bit too tame for its own good. Danger Zone limits you to one life and has five waves of enemy targets come in, aircraft and ground troops both trying to take you down as you linger in the same area. The campaign’s focus on diverse areas and objectives made such conflicts riveting mixes of fast battles and careful management, but Danger Zone has you without any back up and whittling down enemy forces without concerns like needing to protect allies or clearing foes in a limited amount of time removes some of the pressure that made the management engaging. Danger Zone feels a little slow by comparison despite being very difficult and thus it’s better handled with an abundance of caution since there’s no back-up to split enemy attention. It is a relatively small mode, but there is online multiplayer though and it is still functional if you can arrange someone to play with. It does require a separate purchase to acquire a multiplayer license unfortunately since this game came out back when the used game market lead to publishers pulling such tricks to try and make you buy the game new. There are cooperative mission to be had though as well as competitive battles where the flight and fight mechanics transfer over nicely, and here is where you can start to use rewards from the main game to boot. Doing well enough on missions, performing specific kill types, or completing side objectives earns you points towards a star rating that unlocks different real world jet planes to use in addition to different weapon sets, colorations, and decals for your plane, there being actual advantages to different air crafts and missile types so replaying a mission to do better can pay off with something useful but not overpowered.

THE VERDICT: Top Gun: Hard Lock concocts a good way to give you more accuracy in its high-speed aerial dogfights without robbing those battles of their intensity, the attention it gives to fleshing out mission objectives beyond just taking out enemy aircraft helping it to remain challenging and exhilarating. The light touch of story is just present enough so the plot can have a proper build-up to its finale, and while some extra activities like the Danger Zone survival stages come up short, the strategic considerations that arise in the game’s varied campaign stages make its main jet fighter action more than just a series of simple Hard Lock conflicts.

And so, I give Top Gun: Hard Lock for PlayStation 3…

A GOOD rating. The Hard Lock system certainly could have been at risk at oversimplifying the aerial combat of Top Gun: Hard Lock, but instead it turned out to be a complementary system that slides in neatly as part of an arsenal. Some fights will require you to focus on multiple targets so locking onto one foe for the more guaranteed kill can eat up precious time, but some enemies are so flighty you’ll still want to pull them into the chase so that you have a hope of wiping them out. You’re not useless when you’re flying normally either, but the game begins to demand more of you as target management becomes an important part of success, the game even able to diversify how battles are shaped without straining believability. Trying to take down an incoming flotilla while being signal-jammed so you can’t track them easily by radar feels quite different from defending UN troops on a hill from enemy forces. Sneaking around radar, hunting down bombers, trying to pepper foes you’d be weaker against in a Hard Lock, the changes to how fights unfold in the campaign keep things exciting and put your skills to the test often enough that it never feels like the game has dumbed things down or kept you from being capable. Danger Zone does make it clear that some of these systems work best together though as removing ally pilots can make managing enemy forces too touchy and dangerous, but there’s definitely enough meat to the main game to make this a jet action game worth experiencing.

Even if the Top Gun name means little to you, the aerial combat featured in Top Gun: Hard Lock and its simple story featuring mostly new characters make this more an exciting jet fighting game than some attempt to ride a name to success. A good sense for how different types of combat should intermingle, Top Gun: Hard Lock provides many satisfying strategic challenges on top of its high octane action because it is willing to push against you while still giving you the means to keep up provided you figure out how best to utilize your skills.