You can fly in a virtual cockpit, using your joystick hat to look around, or you can play in a more X-Wing style mode with a full screen view, or you can play from a chase view where sub-windows are superimposed to let you see your MFD's. The arcade feel is also thrust in your face with the choice of viewing modes. This isn't your regular sim tour of duty, but for those after diverse thrills there's much fun to be had in both day and night sorties. The mission variety itself is good, with targets ranging from other jets and helos through cruisers to ground installations, tanks and supply trucks. Another clue to where the game's ethos lies. If you do take out the launcher you'll get a "mission complete" victory message, even if you're about to be blown to smithereens by five inbound SAMs - missions in Hornet's Nest end when the goals are met, no need to fly back to base. If you turn quick enough after takeoff you can also fly under a high suspension bridge too. You don't have to fly down the trench, but if you do it prevents SAM sites getting a lock on you. Mission two is like something from Star Wars in icy Siberia you have to fly down a twisting canyon, blowing up a couple of nuclear towers along the way, before popping up over a ridge to take out a huge missile launcher. The first mission sees you sent off to take out enemy cruisers, dealing with any air threat en route.
The movie feel of the game is soon in evidence. Nothing spectacular, but pretty to look at. The choice of setting offers the 3D-accelerated game engine a chance to show itself off in icy mountains, over desert and in tropical climes, and it does a fine job of it too. In Hornet's Nest there are plenty of them - first up a breakaway general with a splinter army in Siberia, then some religous zealot looking to grab power after Saddam Hussein disappears in Iraq, and finally a madman in Colombia who's blown up the Panama Canal.
Either way the premise is that you're part of a special response team known as the Hornet's Nest, sent to trouble spots around the world to smite the bad guys. The game has the choice of either instant action mode or a long campaign. So, in what way is this a Top Gun game? Well, none really, bar the far-fetched style of the campaign missions. I bought the soundtrack album when the movie came out, but not a sniff of any of the tracks in the game. Sadly it's not just the faces that are absent, but the music too. In fact, none of the movie's pilots make an appearance (as far as I saw) and the only character you'll recognise is the bald guy - you know, the one who was in Back To The Future III and probably a whole string of other movies I've since forgotten. OK, so how about 'Iceman'? Well, no Val Kilmer either. It doesn't take a genius to work out that it's very unlikely that Microprose could ever afford Tom Cruise ('Maverick') to make even a ten-second appearance in the game and still have money left over to pay anyone to write some code. So, if you're a hardcore sim-pilot wanting an authentic F/A-18 experience you'll likely be disappointed, but if it's just seat-of-your-pants arcade mayhem you're into, well, Top Gun: Hornet's Nest makes an acceptable stab at providing it.
That of course need not be a bad thing in itself, if that's what you're looking for. That means it's an action-oriented game with emphasis on an arcade style and with missions more in keeping with a movie script than with reality. Well, this is in fact the second game to use the license, the first being Top Gun: Fire at Will, and the format is pretty similar to that original. So you'd expect a game based on Top Gun to be pretty hot stuff. The movie pretty much put his career into afterburner mode. There are few movies that pump out as much testosterone as Top Gun, and most of that pumping came from Tom Cruise.