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

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Review : The Last Remnant

Despite its rather unoriginal premise, you shouldn't simply dismiss Last Remnant as another typical "save the world" JRPG because it was obviously built to appeal equally to both Western and Japanese audiences. Traditional Japanese character designs are married to more conventional Western gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, the gameplay is rather uneven. The game sometimes feels like an MMORPG as you head from one location to kill the bad guys, level up your party, then return to town to upgrade your equipment. The game's Guild Tasks are more like achievements than actual quests while missions acquired in the game's various pubs break the flow of the game entirely. You also can't queue up missions-take on a quest and you have to finish it before you can go do something else.

The Final Battle

The Last Remnant's presentation is also a mixed bag; it's a beaut and pushes the Unreal Engine 3 to its limits; there are epic "Lord of the Rings" type battles with over 70 characters on screen at one time. But this creates a great deal of confusion, as the character models blend together. It's rather chaotic and I usually found myself unable to tell which characters belonged to me, and which ones belonged to the enemies. Your party's health and action points are also completely restored after each battle, which eliminates any sense of danger or importance that the story might thrust on you.

There's also an interesting "party within a party" system called Unions-instead of issuing commands to individual members, you build Unions made up of diverse party members. Using the system, you can manage your army by creating new battle formations and swapping out party members. Experimenting with different formations can be incredibly rewarding and it's important to constantly re-arrange your warriors in order to get the best battle results.

Deadlocked

It's really too bad that The Last Remnant is so uneven. For every one thing it does right, there is a glaring fault that ruins the fun. I'm willing to blame some of the problems I experienced on the fact that I was playing a review build of the game; hopefully, Square Enix will fix some of the more glaring issues like slowdown and lag before the game hits store shelves. But even despite this, The Last Remnant is an uneven effort that offers up a handful of interesting moments rather than a solid role playing experience from beginning to end, which, considering the pedigree of company that produced it, is truly a shame.

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Review : The Godfather II

Back in the dark days when every other publisher was frantically jumping on the openworld bandwagon, we ended up with the core of a sometimes-quite-good Godfather game. You could rough up the working class, have fun smashing people's heads into inanimate objects and throw crooks off rooftops. Imagine The Punisher in a classic Mafioso setting with kill.switch cover mechanics. It had potential.

But this being mid-decade, it was inevitably ruined by some of the worst excesses of cut-and-paste sandbox design: incessant, brain-numbing repetition, needless padding and tedious map-spanning driving. Just to make the feeling of missed-opportunity all the more intense, EA also committed the cardinal sin of completely wasting the contributions of Hollywood legends like Marlon Brando and Robert Duval. As mindlessly enjoyable as certain elements of the game were, 6/10 was charitable given how good it could have been.

Making a better sequel shouldn't have been that difficult for a studio with the resources and experience of EA Redwood Shores. All it really needed was a tighter structure and more memorable and more challenging missions. But while the follow-up undoubtedly has a far better structure, the feeling that you're essentially playing a series of disconnected side-quests persists. It's a game strangely lacking in soul, and consistently fails to make you care about what you're doing and why. From start to finish you'll play on autopilot, shooting all the nasty men unquestioningly in what amounts to the ultimate pissing contest.

"How was I to know all the cars were going to be stolen?"

EA does at least try to make mobster genocide a slightly less tedious process than last time around. Whereas before you were basically a ludicrous one-man war machine with a penchant for extortion and torture, the sequel builds on the idea of having henchmen that can accompany you on your travels. This time you can recruit and train up to seven 'family members', whom you meet every time you take over a new business. Each has a specialist skill, such as medic, arson, engineer, safecrack and so on, and after a quick 'interview' you can decide whether to add them to your ranks or (in my case) pass on the basis of their rubbish hair.

As you wander around New York, you can simply allow them to trail after you providing backup, or send them to take over rival businesses on your behalf. Doing so involves diving periodically into the new Don's-eye-view map, flicking through a few menus and commanding troops to do your bidding. By simply clicking on a business, you have the option of bombing it (and therefore taking it out of commission) or taking it over completely and earning money from it. It's risky if your men aren't quite up to the job, but as you earn money you can spend your winnings on beefing up their health and abilities. Fortunately, your crewmembers never actually die in the traditional sense, but stay out of commission for a few minutes.

Groovy, improbable hairstyles are the best thing about the game.

It's a neat idea, because it ensures that you can get on with other things if you so choose, such as performing 'favours' for corrupt officials and vengeful members of the public, such as smashing up a nominated business, or providing a 'beat down' (or even a contract kill) on a specific person. The favours system is a decent concept in theory, but the way the game presents them to you is utterly comic, and symptomatic of some of the lazy design compromises. Most hilarious is the way that a gaggle of revenge-crazed individuals appear from nowhere and, one after the other, casually ask you to brutalise their cheating partner, while the guy next to them wants the landlord dead for daring to want to modernise their pad. It's like the game's very own mob market, and so wonderfully broken.

But living with such quirks is sadly necessary. To make real progress, it's not simply a case of taking over all your rival's businesses, but going to the trouble of finding out exactly where each of their corresponding family members hang out, and then executing them in a precise way. Drawing inspiration from the previous game's Contract Kill sub-missions, wiping out your foes for good requires precise execution instructions, such as the use of a specific weapon aimed at the kneecaps, or utilising the environment in a grisly fashion. Once these 'soldiers' are out of commission, enemy retaliation is correspondingly weaker, and eventually their compound unlocks, allowing you to steam in and wipe everyone out (including their Don) before setting your demolition expert to work and blowing the place to kingdom come.

And so it goes on. With five families to take out across three locations (New York, Florida and Cuba) the formula is rinsed, repeated and recycled, with occasional story elements woven into the game every now and then. Similar to last time around, the narrative is something of a sideshow to the main event of 'owning' the map, and as such doesn't provide the focal point like most narrative-driven action games. During the early portion of the game, it's a little disorientating to find yourself lacking any specific 'missions' to perform. With no green cross to chase on the mini-map, you can find yourself getting caught up in a cycle of doing needless favours for people simply because it makes you feel like you're doing something. But once you accept and understand that real progress comes from taking over businesses, finding out the location of rival soldiers and then wiping them out, there's mild satisfaction to be gleaned out of this somewhat clunky procedure.

That said, there's a lingering feeling that the game's 3D map system and accompanying menus amount to little more than a shortcut to getting your hands dirty. While the original Godfather forced players into OCD-heavy repetition, at least it was you actually pulling the trigger and getting to see the whites of your enemy's eyes. In the sequel, if you use the map a lot you can end up being essentially the commander of operations with only a peripheral involvement in a large portion of the action.

Worse still, it's not even as if you can play it like a strategy game, because you never get to see how the battle plays out, and only get updates on the progress when your men get taken out. So as much as giving players the chance to send their family members off to do battle is welcome in some respects, it reduces the action to little more than a protracted dice roll. The in-game advisor even tells you what your chances of winning are - not once was there any feeling of tension. I won practically every single time, and even when I lost I could send more soldiers in to recapture whatever I was after before the enemy had a chance to repopulate it.

Hi! We're here to provide the illusion of enemy AI!

To diminish the tension even further, the decision to give everyone recharging health means there's rarely any requirement to play the game skillfully. You just charge in all-guns-blazing, snap between targets with the hugely generous auto-aim facility and blitz one obliging enemy after another. At the core there remains an enjoyably precise combat system, but EA has predictably pandered to the mysterious demands of the audience of players who want games to be played for them and want zero challenge, and for death to be the exception rather than the rule.

Frankly, the sight of you and your AI buddies charging around getting raked with gunfire and sprinting away unharmed is a pathetic sight, and smacks of game designers not even bothering to try anymore. You're almost invincible for the large majority of the game, and there's practically no need to make any effort. The game aims for you, and then rapidly recharges your health when you screw up - and with three AI players now fighting on your side, you can often just let them get on with most of the hard work anyway - or just start the battle from the world map and avoid getting your hands dirty altogether. It's one thing giving the player a less frustrating experience, but another entirely to make it feel as if victory is a foregone conclusion.
The Don's view map system takes an awful lot of the faff out of taking over the city, but ends up being too much of an easy shortcut to commend.

To compound matters rather tragically, the game features some technical howlers that make no sense. Towards the latter third of the game the traffic completely disappeared for me, leaving an eerily empty world, also devoid of pedestrians. As well as making the game feel horribly empty, it meant that I had no choice but to travel across the city on foot, running for miles before coming across a rare parked car. And what of the game's PlayStation Home-esque art and animation style? There can't be too many people willing to stick up for that clinical, soulless style with its lurid colour balance. Seen in the context of a full game, it's even less appealing. Far from evoking a Mafioso style, its horribly dated-looking mannequins do the subject matter zero justice.

Having had such a great run of form with new IP, this is a stark return to the EA of old, where a treasured licence is butchered irredeemably. Lacking both a challenge and soul, and failing to even engage on a narrative level, what you're left with is an overly forgiving shooter with weak strategy elements, which only serve to make it even easier for you. Having played right to the end, I wish there was something I could point to in its defence, but all I'm left with is the empty realisation that they've managed to somehow make this even less entertaining than the flawed original.

Credit : Kristan (www.eurogamer.net)

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PES 2010 New Season

Konami?s footballing legend evolves into the most realistic football simulation ever this Autumn.

Konami Digital Entertainment GmbH has announced that its forthcoming PES 2010 title will benefit from the most exhaustive raft of new features in the series' history, with every aspect of the game benefiting from key improvements. Major gameplay additions will make PES 2010 the most realistic football simulation available.

PES 2010 is scheduled for release on PLAYSTATION®3, Xbox 360, PC-DVD, PSP® (PLAYSTATION®Portable), PlayStation®2 and mobile phones in the Autumn, and follows months of analysis and feedback monitoring to enhance the game in every area. PES Productions, Konami's Tokyo-based development team, has collated feedback on the series' strengths and weaknesses via fan forums, both ardent and casual PES players and press comment, and has incorporated a wide range of requests in the new game. The result will be the most challenging, realistic and satisfying PES to date.

Konami has spent the last year expanding the development team's numbers, and created a number of dedicated departments, each striving to further improving their respective parts of the game both in the short and long terms. Key additions for PES 2010 include:

Gameplay: PES 2010 focuses on enhancing the excitement of matches between players, making for a truly challenging experience that will constantly test the player. Intuitive zonal defending will cover spaces and players need to look constantly for new ways to attack. PES 2010 focuses on being a real football simulation, as it requires both strategic play and quick reactions, as in real life. In addition to key out-field elements, goalkeepers are more versatile and with abilities matching those of modern shot-stoppers. The game's referees have also been reworked, with smarter AI elements allowing them to make more balanced calls during matches.

Improved Visuals: PES 2010 has undergone a major visual revamp, with its celebrated player likenesses and animations now even closer to those of real-life players - including live player expressions to be depicted with an improved lighting system which differentiates between various conditions! Stadium detail is also massively improved, with the grass and other in-stadium elements finely depicted.

All-new animation and moves: Animations now dovetail into each other seamlessly, with dribbling and shots on goals worked into dribbling animations. More individual skills are also on show, including new flicks and tricks that have a definite showing on the way a game flows. Several elements have been completely reworked, with the dribbling, turning and kicking animations greatly enhanced, while there is a noticeable change in pace when a player passes a ball from a standing position than from within a run.

Match-Day Atmosphere: Crowd reactions to the on-field action are now more varied, with all new chants and cheers. The subtle difference between Home and Away matches will be reproduced, and the crowd will react spontaneously to specific situations in a game, showing their disdain or pleasure as fouls are committed and goals scored. Likewise, the commentary has been altered to offer a fresher, more concise overview of the game.

Enhanced Master League: Master League has been thoroughly renewed with the enhancement of managerial aspects, which enables users to enjoy managing a team for a longer career lifespan. Seen by many as a key contributor to the series' success, the Master League elements in PES 2010 have been bolstered by far-ranging and vital new additions, dedicated to enriching the mode. Further details will be announced shortly.

AI: The Tokyo team has worked to improve the AI of the game, with Teamvision 2.0 implemented. Midfielders and defenders now work together to cover open space and close down attacks, meaning that cover can be provided for lower-ranked defenders. This also has the additional effect of removing soft goals, thus returning PES 2010 to its simulation roots. In terms of attacking, players can also now move several players once, sending them into different areas, opening up more goal-scoring possibilities than ever before. As such, PES 2010 necessitates a new level of control from the player. Strategic thinking is as important as quick passing, but the new system greatly opens the way the player oversees control of the team. In free kick scenarios, for instance, players can now instigate the runs of the players awaiting the ball in the penalty area.

Individual Play Characteristics: In previous PES games, the team formation has determined the movements of the players. PES 2010 introduces a new system wherein the individual attacking and defending nature of the players is integral to the way they play. Each player enjoys unique AI tied into their best abilities, and is reflected in the actions of their team mates - i.e. if a player who is known to be a good crosser of the ball is in possession, more players will flood the penalty area to receive it. Similarly, if a player is known to be good with close control, defenders will work to cover their stronger side, while lone strikers will be automatically supported by midfielders on receipt of the ball.

Strategy Use: A new power gauge system allows users to balance their strategy in a quick, but wide-ranging way before a match. Every element - pass frequency, movement, the line of defence, width of play, or the position of the front line - can be altered to match those of a favoured club: Juventus Turin are a dangerous side on the counter-attack, for instance, while FC Barcelona use width in their attack. These formulations can be altered at any point, too, with Home and Away matches forcing different circumstances on the user, as does the rigours of a Master League season.

Penalties: An all-new system has been implemented, offering greater control, placing and accuracy.

Enhanced Online: A new dedicated section of the Tokyo team is committed to improving the online side of PES 2010. More downloadable content is also planned. Konami has supported PES 2009 with the release of new licensed teams, transfer updates, etc, and this support will grow for PES 2010. Team and content updates are planned throughout the game's lifespan. These will make the game even more bespoke to the player's match day needs.

Konami has strengthend its relationship with UEFA and can announce it has secured the exclusive video game rights for the Europa League Licence (formerly known as the UEFA Cup). In addition Konami will be enhancing and developing the use of the UEFA Champions League within PES 2010 to make even better use of the best club football competition in the world.

Further details of these new features will be released in the coming months. Konami has also confirmed that Lionel Messi will also be a key endorsement player for the new game, and will feature in the promotion and development of the game later this year.

"We have been monitoring feedback and comments on the progression of the PES series for some time now, and PES 2010 will see us implementing a great deal of the ideas players have been requesting," commented Naoya Hatsumi, Producer for PES Productions at Konami Digital Entertainment Japan. "We aim to make PES 2010 a more user-friendly, immediate experience that places the emphasis on getting straight into the gameplay for which the series is famed. PES 2010 will look better, will play better, and will recreate real football as closely as the current hardware will allow."

"The preparations for PES 2010 have been in place for some time now, with the reorganization and increase of the Tokyo-based studio allowing expert teams to concentrate on their particular area," commented Jon Murphy, PES European Team Leader. "We are now in a better position to implement the greatest raft of changes and improvements to the series we have seen, and thank the PES community for their input."

From : Konami (http://uk.games.konami-europe.com)

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