OXCGN’s HAWX Review:  Two Views From The Cockpit

GrathiusXR – XboxOZ360 review the game

by GrathiusXR:

©2009 Arthur Kotsopoulos:- CE (Community Editor)

Come fly with me, come fly, let’s fly away…

Come fly with me, come fly…well unfortunately you wouldn’t want to do so because then you’ll be in for a less than average thrill ride.  And it’s not because I’m a sucky wingman either…

HAWX (High Altitude Warfare Experimental) is a game by Ubisoft and part of their infamous Tom Clancy franchise which over the years has provided some great games.  You know the ones I’m talking about… Rainbow Six Vegas, Splinter Cell, GRAW 1 & 2, EndWar etc..

Their newest direction for a  game is HAWX, where all you do is fly a fighter jet, blow some enemies up, do barrel rolls and that’s about it.

To a gamer who enjoys his First Person Shooters (FPS), sport games, action-adventure and so on, a flying game really isn’t my usual flavour. So I didn’t have high hopes that HAWX  would hold my attention enough to finish the game, never mind continue to unlock all the items within it.

• HAWX Launch Trailer

HAWX begins with the standard introductory mission which explains the basics of the game and the storyline. It wasn’t all that interesting since I just wanted to fly a War Plane and blow things up.

Upon completing the first mission you get contracted to a private military organization to complete the different contracts they issue out to you. Before each mission you get a nice prime-time news bulletin style cutscene which explains what you need to do and why.

They luckily don’t drag out so long that you begin to get bored and start fussing to fly the fighter jets.

At first not much is available in terms of different jets as well as missiles, so you have to make due with the crappy stuff.  However, as you progress and gain experience points for completed missions and complete achievements such as kill 100 tanks or dodge 10 missiles you gain in levels.

This then increases your rank as well as unlocks new aircraft to use for the next mission and so forth.

Even then the first 4-5 missions you can only select from either 2 or 3 jets.  Where one may have better ground damage, another has better speed but they pretty much do the same stuff.

If you find yourself two missions in and you’re already bored with it, wait till you unlock Assists Off. This option really makes the game more fun and enjoyable to play.

This pretty much makes the camera view dynamic and pulls it farther away from the jet. It’s much more annoying to maneuver the aircraft but it makes it more challenging an rewarding too. You can stall the aircraft very easily so you have to be careful when doing moves to evade missiles and enemy aircraft.

Whereas in normal cock pit view, 3rd person view and so forth you cannot stall the aircraft at all because Assists are turned on. It’s good that they give a training mission where you practice with Assists Off so you get a good understanding of how it works.

You’re also free to use it during missions at any point so it is a nifty option if you get bored of being too good and the game being a tad too easy.

From a visual standpoint it the game is nothing special.   Up close the jets look fantastic and the flames look unreal as well.

The terrain appears nice from a distance but once you’re up close mountains look bland, tanks look dull and buildings are plain and simple with minimal detail.

Compared to Ace Combat, which was released quite some time ago, in my opinion, this game does rather poorly in the graphics department.

In terms of sound it just doesn’t sound heavy enough for me. Meaning that the missiles and the explosions sound very light, almost as if they have no force to them. Explosions need to be big, sound horrifying and make the gamer proud to have blown something up, where here it just sounds somewhat tame in comparison to some other titles.

All of these make for an average flight game that doesn’t really bring anything new to the table but extreme ease of use. If you are not a fan of games like these then there is really no incentive to go out and buy it, but if you are hungry to take to the skies then the unlockables available should make for a lengthy game and with so few games of this sort released on the console, probably worth the money.

©2009 Arthur Kotsopoulos: CE (Community Editor)

“7.5/10

HAWX Review: High Altitude Warfare Experimental

Ubisoft’s first attempt at the Flight Sim market – did it work?

by XboxOZ360

©2009 Grant Smythe: EIC

I want this patch for my leathers

I’m a Sim nut. Hmm, that doesn’t sound right, now does it. Let’s put that a different way.

I enjoy simulation ‘games’ be it on four wheels or in the air far above the tarmac miles below. I have some ‘serious’ hours invested in these genres with over 400 hrs in Forza 2, played Ace Combat through 6 times, I think Race Pro is great (except for some niggles here and there), and enjoy wasting hours upon hours staring at the screen as I clip 100th of second off track times, or trying to get through an entire game in the one aircraft on all missions.

But hey, that’s just me. So when I heard about HAWX and that Ubisoft had hatched HAWX as part of the Tom Clancy franchise, my little heart did some serious pounding, and for an old bugger, sometimes that ‘s not so good.

I always look forward to my adrenaline fix that these games give me, so I waited, waited and waited for what seemed an eternity for it to arrive for previewing. Ubisoft could almost bank on my calls and emails arriving like clockwork several times a week asking “hey guys …. when are we (OXCGN) getting the game….” At least they know that if anything, I’m persistent.

For me the game has some brilliant moments and excellent sections on several levels, but it also lets itself down in areas that could well have made a huge difference with many gamers out there. I can tolerate certain things in many games, and do, and I’m willing to work through them. Many other gamers however are not so patient, and will down a game faster than a self-guided short ranged heat seeking missile. Fire, seek, bang, no-joy flight leader – try again … throw controller down . . . game over . . . back to the shop.

• HAWX Team Death Match Video

Games of this nature do need to be easily grasped by the average gamer, but they also need to offer the die-hard the option to pit their skills to the very limit of their abilities. Otherwise what’s the point in having a game in the first place if not to ‘challenge’ the player.

Some say the visuals are average, some say excellent, but after spending what seems light years in the cockpit of the “CFA-44 Nosferatu” in Ace Combat, you can see a distinct difference between the two. Ubisoft uses Google Maps and Satellite imagery to get detailed views of real-world areas and I’d have to say they look damn fine really.

Sure, getting up-close-n-personal with buildings below 300 feet doesn’t show civilians running around or cars streaming around, or even tanks plodding along the surface like they should do. We are talking about a very fast paced game here, not a movie or a flight version of PGR or GRiD. So close detail is not needed.

What tanks that are there simply skim across the surface almost as if on ice. Much the same way as they do in Ace Combat, which is exceptionally annoying when seen in the enemy preview window. It just looks naff, and would be better off not being there at all (the tanks that is). But hey, you do need some idea of what is happening in the battle zone.

Having said that, there is a huge difference in the ‘details’ of the maps in HAWX, one that is appreciated by someone who has spent some hours flying upside down, under bridges and through ravines in “that other game”.

• HAWX High Stall Assists Off

That huge sense of ultra high Mach 1 – 2 speed is missing in HAWX. The High G turns don’t feel all that High G in comparison to other normal turns, and the lack of being able to do major maneuvers is just one huge let down. Which leads me to my next grrrr about the game.

One of the HUGE bugbears for me is the Assists off mode. Why it was created I have no idea…well I do really, but I’m being bitchy right now, so I’m sticking to the “I don’t know why” thing – okay!

The ‘excuse’ was that it gave the player a real world sense of flying. Hello, nobody flies a plane by hanging off the back of it tethered to some invisible umbilical cord a few hundred feet off to the left. This gives the player no real perspective as to where and how they are flying. Yes, they look beautiful, but come on, real world flying experience – hmm, don’t think so.

Sure, it shows the lovely aircraft so that all the wannabe-flight-jocks can see their nice rides, but in all honesty, real sim gamers want to sit in the cockpit and do stalls, slides and barrel rolls to evade in-coming missiles and enemy aircraft, Top Gun style. Not some nancy-boy flight style so you can see your ‘con-trails and sonic booms.

Big disappointment there; sorry Ubisoft, it just doesn’t cut it. The classical barrel-roll and break to drop under your pursuer is not possible, you only have the nose up, stall and loop to get behind them available to you. Not what you’d call “realistic” in any terms.

Additionally, you have NO right stick viewable area in order to locate and follow a target or scout out the terrain for other bogies be that to your left, right up or down. Very realistic – NOT.

There’s a huge omission from this game that was standard in Ace Combat: the ability to save and then replay your “entire” missions. It takes bugger all memory to store  a non-interactive sequence, yet it is absent for some reason on such a major title. It only shows you the tail-end of the last few minutes of the completed mission, then is wiped. A lot of good that is.

It might sound like I’m picking the game to death and that I don’t like it. I’m not, and I do, but I was expecting more. I have learned over the years that you shouldn’t put expectations sky high… Me thinks I should listen to my own advice.  By “expecting” something, you inevitably will be disappointed. By having no expectations, you can often be very surprised.

The game “overall” is exceptionally enjoyable. Mixing different flight viewpoints throughout a mission not only helps you get a handle on the Assistance Off Mode, it also helps in being rewarded with in-game achievements (not GamerPoints). Knocking out X number of fighters using a combination of Ass-Off and Ass-On, plus changing weapons during a ‘sortie’, will give you a sizable points tally to lift you higher in Rank and in the mission levels.

Views from within the cabin are reasonably well detailed; only seeing legs and further in would be  a tad better, but that’s just being picky. Using cockpit view rather than any of the 3rd person perspective or no Hud View does help give you a better lay of the land and how the mission is playing out. To give you a better understanding of where both allies and enemies are and distances from them there is the in-game-map, which does have two scan distances as well.

You do have to be careful when in the Hard and Extreme modes because you get limited ammo and also less damage to bring you down. So in those modes the gamer needs to be cautious rather than gung-ho Top-Gun style flying and shooting anything  that moves as soon as you hear the “Lock-on” sound. There’s no re-arming or getting a new load out like in Ace Combat, so you DO need to be careful of how you do your missions.

This basically means planning them in your head on the fly, sorry for the pun.

Overall, I’ll be playing the game for some time to get all the in-game awards and the Xbox Achievements. But, like way too many games these days, the majority of game points, both in-game and Achievements, are for multiplayer, and the single player misses out “once again”.

It’s a great game, not a dud by a long shot, but it does need some massaging in places. It will give you several hours of solid fun and entertainment, if you like flying and don’t get vertigo . . . Once you get used to NOT looking at the buildings approaching you at high speed, and simply staying focused on the “target” and its movements, then you’ll crash far less. But it IS nice to see an impact on a building if you do happen to collide with it, unlike some flight games where you leave no visible marks whatsoever.

It might sound like I’m really hitting the game hard and see it as a poor game, but I’m not. It has its bugbears, sure, but overall, it is a rewarding and entertaining flight game. It’s a definite keeper for me . . .

• Now if I could only work out how to set this up for the 360 . . . . hmmmm

PC peripherals for HAWX.

©2009 Grant Smythe: EIC

“8.2/10

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