Revision of Tom Clancy's HAWX from Wed, 01/04/2009 - 08:58

Yes it’s that time again, Review time. Now as I know Shad and n0mad have noticed that for the last couple of weeks I have been playing a new game (see above). Now since they have both been nagging me like little girls (:p) about what it’s like it made me think “review time” so with no further adieu shall we get into it.

First things first, if you don’t like flying games then you should go right now because you will not like this review and Shad will post a rant when he finds out that you don’t.
There are not many really strong games that grab you in the aerial combat genre but I have found this game is hard to put down. We will start with the single player campaign.

This can be played on your own or with friends over the net (I have not tried this yet) but either way it is a really gripping story line with good twists. As with a lot of the Tom Clancy games the cinematic at the start and in between missions are to a very high quality. There are many different types of missions that you have to accomplish and some can be very tricky. They range from diving through and canyon about 10mm from the ground to avoid radar detection to defending a very important plane. Also if you have played the Ghost games you will like this as in several missions you are providing close air support to Ghost teams. Allot of the missions you may feel like you are trying to achieve the same things but to keep you from getting bored the creators have thrown in over 50 aircraft for you to play with all with specialised roles a and strengths and weaknesses. Now I’m sorry to burst your bubble but I am not going to go through every one of them because….well… I’m too lazy but I will however show you a few that make me start to drool.

First off the plane that you get towards the end of the campaign it’s the top of the pile in modern air warfare.

The FA-22 Raptor

At least in this game it is a fantastic plane. It has stealth tech so is hard for enemies to get a lock on you and even if they do if you have even a tiny bit of skill you can throw the missile off with ease.

Then we have a very famous close ground support aircraft and one of my favs.

The A-10 Thunderbolt

When it comes to close ground support the buck stops here. If you want to blast through the middle of multiple AA and Sam sites, nail your target and then fly back over them just to rub it in, this is your bird. The Thunderbolt and deal huge damage to ground targets with its nose mounted cannon and missile pods and without breaking a sweat its can take all the damage the enemy can through at it.
However there is a downside if you come up against enemy interceptors you better hope for divine intervention as this plane does not excel at air-air combat.

Now is anyone feeling a bit Top Gun? I know I always am. (those were the good days before Tom Cruise decided he was and alien.)
But anyway back on topic.
We have the F14 Tomcat

This aircraft is a long range interceptor so excels at hitting targets long before they can get you. And YES the wings do move when you’re flying.
It is quite a high speed aircraft so strafing runs of ground targets can get interesting but hey that’s what they made ejector seats for.

Ok so I know what you’re going to say “But Blood I want to go REALLY fast!” And I have just the plane for your. It’s big, long and black. And you all need to get your minds out of the gutter!

The SR-71B Blackbird

This is a fantastic plane that is completely useless, Unless you just want to go like a bat outta hell in which case you will love it. Its unstable and nasty to fly at low speed but once you put that hammer down and hit mach 2 this plane comes into its own and there is nothing like flying that fast about 2 ft from the ground.

And the last plane I’m going to show you is very new like the raptor but it can hover. It was in the latest Die Hard movie.

The F-35

Now while this is a very cool plane since you can’t hover it feels a bit like the poor mans FA-22. In air to air combat its only 2nd to the FA-22 so can more than hold its own in a dogfight but it still doesn’t spin my wheels.

Well that’s that for aircraft team if you want to see the rest you will have to get the game.

Now I think we will look in depth about the game play and GFX. This game has taken allot of flak because it feels more like and arcade game than a Sim. But I think the way you have to look at it is that it’s not realistic but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. One of the first things is the assistance off mode in which you pretty much turn the in flight computer off. You can do far cooler moves but you also run the risk of stalling the aircraft. The best trick is how you can slide the aircraft by using the breaks just like on Top gun. This feature makes dog fights a lot of fun.
Another thing you notice straight away is the fact you have around 70 primary missiles and normally about 20 secondary now as you can guess that’s not possible on a real life aircraft but when I was playing I found that I just didn’t care it was too much fun.
There is also a system called ERS which helps you in tricky situations. I will give you and example. You are taking out ground targets in a city and there is a tank in a group of small buildings. You can just go LEEERROOOY and fire as it will just hit the buildings and that’s not very nice. But if you look at the HUD you will notice a like ERS icon flashing. If you press the corresponding key a bunch on yellow or red triangles will appear on the screen. If you fly the aircraft through these(can be challenging sometimes) it will guide you to the best attack path for the target.
Now all aircraft also have a machine gun of some sort in case you run out of missiles or god forbid the targeting computer stops working ( I tried jiggling the cable). The HUD provides aiming circles for using this weapon so it’s not impossible to use but it’s not too easy.

Now the GFX. In the air the GFX are really good the planes are very detailed and they put allot of time into making it look realistic down the when you break the sound barrier you can see the white cloud form around your aircraft. If you take a really close look at the ground it’s not fantastic but its good enough that it doesn’t ruin the experience of the game.

The multi-player aspect of the game is quite basic. You can fly in a squad of up to 4 players on all the single player maps and it’s just a basic dogfight with the team who get the most amounts of kills in the time allotted wins. While this is fun it can get boring after a while. I’m hoping they mite bring out updates with other types of mult missions. There are (powerups) in multi-player thou which give things like repair bots or weapon restrictions which adds another aspect to the game.

All in all I think this is a really fun game and definite must buy if you in enjoy Aircraft games.

It gets a 9/10 Blood Drops only let down by the lack of multi-player content.