Top Gun for Wii owners?... Oiled volleyball anyone?
So once you’re actually up in the air, how does Heatseeker actually fly? Well it’s not too shabby really, though you might find yourself having to tweak the Wiimote sensitivity a tad to get the best out of it. You get a choice of two control options: arcade is pretty much left and right, up and down with the analogue stick on the nunchuck doing your throttle. The professional control set adds in rolling so a twist on the Wiimote induces a roll and then angling it up pulls back on the stick in the cockpit... which is much closer to how real planes are flown.But, (and you knew one of those was coming, eh?), Heatseeker doesn’t get away from the fact it is an arcade game. So despite the two control sets, the action remains the same. To my mind this is a good thing as the Wii just isn’t capable of handling the graphics needed for decent flight sim and though I’m speaking purely from personal opinion, it’s not the platform I’d expect to see a complex flight sim on anyway... We’ve got quad core, DX10 PCs for the likes of Flight Sim X, the Wii is the fun box for a bit of light-hearted, quick-fix, fun gaming... and in that respect Heatseeker ticks most of the boxes.
I say ‘most’ because after just a short amount of play you’ll figure out that the best way to get a kill is to throttle up to close the gap, then throttle back as the enemy comes in range than let loose with your missiles. Seeing as the enemy nearly always enters the battle area in formation it’s simply a case of locking onto the next guy once the first bogey is down. If you’re quick enough you can decimate the entire flight leaving just one to pick off once the formation breaks to attack their target.
However, get into a proper dogfight of the Top Gun ilk and things are a bit different. Your HUD tells you where your next target is but your onboard computer must be a badly built Spectrum ZX81 as the damn thing rarely picks the closest threat and pretty much always goes for the mission critical targets. This can be a problem as you computer will quite happily focus on a lone bomber which is heading for home whilst 5 enemy fighters form an orderly queue behind you to ram one up your tailpipe.
Fortunately, you can manually select your targets by pressing the A button, which cycles you through all available targets. However this is flawed too as, unlike much other combat flight sims, your weapon selection has no impact on which targets you cycle through... you get the whole lot all the time. This is annoying when you have to fend off fighters and take out ground targets and yes, I know the game let’s you fire air-to-air missiles at ground targets if your desperate, but it would’ve been more fun and easier to see what’s going on if my radar filtered targets according to my weapon selection.
But overall, the air-to-air combat is fun and at times quite challenging. Heatseeker keeps the pace up nicely and gives an almost cinematic performance as cameras rapidly switch to show your missiles streaking home and the enemy disintegrating before dropping back into the cockpit. Even though the action is interrupted on occasion by short cutscenes, again, this just adds to the cinematic feels of the game, so anyone with aspirations of being Maverick from Top Gun can now put down that bottle of baby oil and stop hanging around the local lido by the volleyball nets and get some of the Top Gun feel at home instead.
