"It's like two games in one. Unfortunately, one of them sucks."

I admit that I had very low hopes for this game. I enjoy the flight-sim genre, so I was very interested in any flight game coming out for the DS; but when I saw that it was also releasing on the GBA...and there were no pictures and very little details about it, my spirits started to fall. Once I found out Majesco was developing it, I just about gave up on the whole thing.

But I recently noticed that the game had came out and figured I would at least give it a chance. I have played some bad, bad games, and this couldn't be much worse.

What I found was very impressive, and at the same time very depressing.

The really interesting thing was that the developers decided to include a highly detailed cockpit, making excellent use of the bottom touch screen. The cockpit contains multiple digital displays that can be manipulated, around a dozen interactive buttons and levers, and functioning gauges. You can even grab onto the flight yoke with the stylus and drag it around to fly the plane. But doing so is of course suicide; you are much better off sticking with the normal digital pad for flying. The top screen shows your HUD, and the view outside of the plane.

This is where the problem starts. Basically, “F-24: Stealth Fighter” for the DS is simply a port of the GBA version. The game engine is clearly designed for the meager hardware of the GBA, as the enemy aircraft are simply sprites of the back of a MiG. They are not 3D objects, they don't turn, they just sort of move left and right away from you. It is essentially like shooting at paper cut outs of airplanes.

So in essence, you are playing “Top Gun” on the NES; but doing so through a realistic and highly detailed cockpit.

Clearly you can see the problem here. All of the little buttons and lights in the world don't make up for the fact that you are shooting at a picture of an airplane. In fact, you don't even see them explode. Once you fire a missile at one of them, you will see a tiny CG video of a generic plane explosion on one of the displays in your cockpit.

It is really a shame, since at first glance the game looked like it would really be something special. As far as a flying game goes, it is possibly the best on the system at the moment, but if you want to do anything other than flying in a circle over the ocean, you are likely going to be disappointed.

Besides the graphical limitations of this GBA-to-DS conversion, the enemy aircraft are ridiculously hard to keep track of. You will be flying behind the enemy, only to have them loop up above you. But the game engine isn't advanced enough to actually handle 3D motion of the enemy craft, so it basically just warps behind you. You will turn as hard as possible to get back on it's tail, only to have it perform it's little warp trick again. I was locked into this cycle for literally 5 minutes with a single enemy aircraft before I just flew away from it at full speed and shot it with a missile from long distance. Close combat dog fighting appears to be impossible against the AI.

Speaking of that, there is a multiplayer mode for up to 4 players; but it is multi-card only, so I was (obviously) unable to test it. I did see that it offered a fair amount of options though, with adjustable game time, score limit, and time of day.

On a final note, I really wonder how close you can get to the “Top Gun” theme without getting sued. The opening music in F-24 sounds about 2 or 3 notes different from the film's theme song. This has to be the most shameless sampling of a song since “Ice Ice Baby”.

Overall, this game is split into two parts. One half is the very well put together DS flight-simulator, and the other half is a mind-numbingly simplistic shooting game that would have been at home on the NES. I can only hope that Majesco is holding onto the advancements made for the DS version of “F-24: Stealth Fighter” to later put together a proper DS-only game. If this game could be paired up with a competent 3D combat/flight engine, it could really shake things up on the DS. But of course...this is Majesco we are talking about.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/07