Review : Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy line of games has really expanded from the Rainbow Sixes and Splinter Cells to add other entries—each one with a specific gameplay focus. The latest, Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., take to the air with real-world combat jets.

It’s important to note, for those who didn’t get a taste of the game through the demo release, that H.A.W.X. is not going to satisfy those looking for a flight sim-like experience. If you wanted that, you should get your disappointment out of the way right now. The flying is fun, but definitely on the arcade side of the spectrum—which doesn’t make it bad, but hardly like some PC-based simulators that take a lot of learning just to get a plane off the ground.

In fact, H.A.W.X. starts you in the air at the beginning of each mission, so you don’t even have to hassle with takeoffs…and there’s no bother with landings either, because you’ll end your missions in the air as well. The focus is on flight combat and fast-paced jets.



While the game is distinctly an action/shooter, there’s an RPG element—something that is being injected into all sorts of games in one form or another, and H.A.W.X. is no different. No matter what game mode you’re playing, you earn XP toward new ranks, up to Level 40. In turn, the leveling process unlocks various components, from maps to planes to combat loadouts.

And there’s a large variety of airplanes and loadouts available to you at the start of each mission (again, provided you’ve unlocked them from gameplay). In one of the ways that H.A.W.X. should cater to all types of players, you’ll be able to choose what plane and loadout you want to take, but you also get a recommended package, so you don’t have to hassle with making decisions about whether you need more air-to-air missiles or not. Go the ones with check marks, hit Start and you’re on your way into the game world with little clerical delay(though only before sitting through the frequently lengthy loading screens). If you want to nuance your plane, however, you can certainly tailor an aircraft selection to the needs of the mission, which are given to you at the start as percentages of different categories, as a forecast of what’s to come.

In addition to the gameplay, H.A.W.X. offers you an extensive slate of challenges for you to complete that’ll add often large chunks of XP to your total. These are like achievements within the game, though instead of an increased Gamerscore, you get XP toward leveling. (Yes, there are still standard Xbox 360 achievements here as well—50 for 1000 points, as is the norm for retail releases—but these are like another layer with a different purpose, that being to support the RPG-ish aspects.) These challenges range from how many kills you get with specific missile or gun types to racking up kills and victories in multiplayer. It’s another game-within-a-game kind of experience, as you’ll frequently check your pilot stats to see what challenges you’re close to getting, so you can work on them. You can also replay any mission you’ve already encountered to keep your pursuit of XP moving forward, to try the higher of the three difficulty levels (up to the toughest Elite difficulty) and to keep racking up the challenges.

As for gameplay, H.A.W.X. is pretty simple: You have the main Campaign story mode, which leads you (in typical Tom Clancy-game fashion) through what seems to be a tale of a contractor-turned-terrorists; and you have a Versus mode for engaging in multiplayer dogfights with others over Xbox Live. Campaign enables you to go solo or team up in co-op with someone over Xbox Live.



Within the Campaign, you’ll have a variety of objectives. These range from Escort or Protect missions, that have you safeguarding some other forces from enemy damage, to straight-up combat sorties that have you bounding from one part of the sky to the next as you clear out other planes, on-ground tanks and everything in between. All of it comes with the traditional voice acting and animated onscreen characters that do the job just fine, but aren’t threatening with photorealism or anything that could be considered state-of-the-art. Though you may be interested in the story and the peripheral action that comes between missions, it’s there, but those aspects of the game are often bypassed so you can get back into the action again, which is where the primary entertainment resides.

As I said earlier, the game isn’t going the way of a flight simulator in taking you into these various combat missions. It’s much more of an arcade game with fairly simple flying mechanics. Still, the experience is fun in its carefree way. H.A.W.X. defaults to “assistance on,” which makes it a bit harder to crash your plane through bad piloting and takes the navigation to the full arcade level. However, switching assistance off trades you the easier control for a bit more versatility in the sky. For example, you can pull the Left Trigger in during a turn to activate the air brakes, which gets you carving tight turns in the air, much like drift-car races—but you have to be careful, because with assistance off, you’re in danger of stalling, which might have you plummeting from the air quickly.

Having assistance turned on, though, does enable you to take advantage of the provided technology that much more (and the Tom Clancy games do like their tech). It gives you access to the E.R.S. or Enhanced Reality System, which gives you in-flight aid for the nearest enemy planes (and where they are), when missiles are incoming (and from where) and weapon handling. The nicest aspect of E.R.S., though, is the trajectory help you can get: If you hit the X Button when there’s a prompt next to an enemy, you’ll get fly-through gates appearing in your display that indicate the best path to take to get in position for a good shot on a target. While most of the targets you want to hit are fairly simple, some are behind mountains or between buildings, and the assistance can come in handy, particularly if you’re a novice flyer.

Conversely, if/when you get used to flying with the assistance turned off (which also changes the perspective on the action, so it’s easy to know at a glance what mode you’re in), it takes the game up a higher level, because you won’t be fighting the controls as much to get done what you want in the game. You’re also more responsible for key parts of your offensive, but it does ease you into that through the game.

H.A.W.X., in fact, has a lot of versatility in how it can be controlled. You might be perfectly happy doing your finger dancing on the standard control pad, but the programmers enabled some advanced handling, if you choose. For example, H.A.W.X. has built-in flight-stick compatibility, so if you have one from Namco’s Ace Combat 6 or perhaps one of the recently released Saitek Aviator Flight Stick, it’s painless to hook up and mostly painless to play.

Another control aspect that’s been included is voice command. If you played EndWar, you probably experimented with the voice command there, and while H.A.W.X. uses the same technology, it’s a more difficult match here. It works great (though with a limited list of acceptable words/phrases), but this isn’t the best way to control your gameplay—in fact, it’s probably more of a novelty than anything else. Still, if you want to go for the added challenge, it’s worth checking out.

Versus mode is fun and exciting, pitting people against each other. It might be a tough sell to get lots of people playing H.A.W.X. over the Internet with just a Team Deathmatch format, the games we played where really slick and often tense, as the action went back and forth between the teams. Hopefully, the feature-light Versus will be expanded through DLC, but we’ll have to see if Ubisoft takes that approach.

As I said in last week’s preview, the game graphics are pretty sharp. The main strength is the real-world satellite data used to make the various cities over which the flight combat takes place. When you get over Los Angeles or Chicago, you start seeing familiar landmarks, which always makes playing a game more fun (provided you know these locations somewhat). Though it’s not much of a boost to the gameplay, it does enhance the downtime during dialogue when you aren’t interacting as much.

The game’s audio side isn’t as strong, with sometimes hokey voice acting—such as when you’re supposed to rescue some Ghosts, and their leader keeps coming on the radio with his faux gravely voice that’s supposed to be intimidating and gruff. It doesn’t really feel that way, and will more likely make you laugh than anything else. The flight and combat noises are sharp, but they don’t stand out…and sometimes you get inaccurate audio, such as when you have successfully targeted and shot down an enemy plane, you’ll sometimes get the disappointed handler audio telling you you missed.

This isn’t H.A.W.X. only shortcoming. The biggest problem I had was getting locked onto a desired target. It seems to default to the nearest ones (you can switch to another target with a tap on the Y Button), but with assistance off, you’re not looking from directly behind your plane, so it’s challenging to turn and get a lock on a specific target that you can see on your radar or which you know is a bigger threat to your mission objectives. You don’t always want the nearest target, and what I found I had to do was switch on assistance, then rotate until the target was in front of the plane so I could select it easier, highlight it and switch back to assistance-off mode. It’s awkward and hopefully Ubisoft will be able to improve this in the future.

This seems to be the nature of H.A.W.X. across the board: It’s quite often entertaining and challenging, but often frustrating and boring as well (such as when you find yourself flying along while you’re getting a briefing on the next part of the mission or when you have to get from Point A to Point B without any combat going on). It’s a good game, but not great—though I suspect there’ll be a portion of the player community that will take to it more than I did. I liked it for a first effort and it’s worth checking out (I know I’ll probably go back and play it again when a final copy comes in), but there’s a lot that can be done to make a sequel much more fun. Let’s hope Ubisoft does that.

Credit : http://reviews.teamxbox.com