HAWX is more Charlie Sheen than Tom Cruise. Screaming through the resulting fireball at twice the speed of sound, turning sharply to line up the next target. of air-to-air missiles which spiral into the distance on a carriage of billowing, snaking smoke.
Watching red diamonds skitter about the HUD in search of targets on the horizon, releasing a flock. You can shout at them too if you've got a mic, which is an undeniably nice touch.Įverything else about the game is immensely satisfying. The squad control is simplistic too, with commands to either send your wingmen forth or reel them back in to cover your arse. Weapon load-outs can be customised, though you're restricted in what you can play with early on, making the armoury rather prescribed for the first half of the game. To have a world to scale would slow things down to a relative crawl, and HAWX is all about speed and wanton bravado.Įlsewhere, there's no real difference in the huge array of planes you gradually unlock as the game moves forward. That is, admittedly, a side-effect of my love of real, proper flight sims. Bring your plane down to ground level and the effect is far more pronounced - your jet must be half a mile long, your wings could scythe through mountains. The world feels terribly scaled down though, and while the combat arena is massive you often feel like you're flying around a shrunken world. Ubisoft Romania have struck a deal with 'innovative geospatial products and solutions provider" GeoEye (), which gives the game's terrain a realistic edge (given that it is, in effect, photos of real places). You'll be left slowly threading your way through clouds for up to 20 seconds at a time, when dropping into Assistance off' mode and doing a backflip will get the job done in three. K Spangly, glittery techno-porn that may be, but outside the city streets example I just related it's a fairly useless feature. For ground targets, especially those in narrow city streets, it'll have you arcing up and over before coming straight down towards the exposed enemy. Pilotwings-style gates hang in the sky for you to fly through. The Enhanced Reality System guides you to targets, and at a touch it can generate a suggested path to bring you into the best firing position. HAWX departs from other arcade flying games in its neon light parade, the glowing visual aids decorating your heads-up display. Otherwise you'll be flying with your killjoy systems on, with a kind of responsiveness that becomes more amiable the more you play.
In this mode, the plane becomes a twitchy dart capable of the tighter turns needed to get a lock onto the faster, more agile targets you'll encounter.
With the off switch flicked, the HUD is reduced, the safety systems are put out of commission (meaning you can stall if you slow down too much), and the camera pulls way back - too far back -to give you a better look at what's going on around you. Put a few missions behind you though, and you unlock the on-board computer's off button.
The first 10 minutes are akin to playing a game from across the room by poking at it with a broom handle. The controls will grate at first, as, unknown to you, they're deliberately made to feel clunky and semi-responsive.
What HAWX offers is a simple, incredibly slick experience, a series of 19 varied and creative missions backed up by a surprisingly robust and involving Tom Clancy-esque plot. The ridiculous while remaining eminently enjoyable and constantly fun. You just don't get flying games like this on PC, ones that skirt so closely to And that, if you're being chased by an enemy jet, you can slam on the breaks to do a 180 backflip so you're flying in reverse, facing and locking on to the surprised enemy. Pinpointing the moment in HAWX where the last vestiges of haughty simulation fall away to reveal the chuckling figure of an arcade game is easy: it's when your flight instructor tells you that by turning off your on-board computer, you can do skids in the sky.