Brutal Gamer

Tom Clancy’s HAWX (Xbox 360) Review

By Leigh - April 12, 2009 - 00:22 UTC

Tom Clancy’s HAWX or High Altitude Warfare eXperimental (the X is to make it seem more Xtreme!) is the latest title to go under the near enough legendary Tom Clancy franchise. The latest title takes a huge swing in a new different direction compared to past titles, instead of leading assaults on terrorist locations with flash grenades, your flying your way around various locations with some of the biggest and best air crafts made to date.

HAWX is the first game in the Tom Clancy’s series to try and tie in all the different franchises into one game. It doesn’t exactly follow each one of the recent games level for level, but during specific missions you’ll be given an objective to give air support to Captain Mitchell, who is the commander of ghosts (GRAW 1 & 2). It doesn’t just hint at the GRAW franchise, it also hints quite a lot towards the End War campaign by talking about (and eventually working for) the Artemis global security, which is basically a giant private army.

The majority of the missions from within the game are incredibly repetitive and can seem like they drag on for a long time, in total there is only a few different types of missions you can do; defend an area, defend a moving object and destroy a specific target, oh and off course, there is some of the most incredibly annoying and fucking frustrating missions I’ve ever played. I’m looking at you the mission where you’ve got to stay below 3000ft in mountainous terrain – which ever developer decided that mission is the sort of person who enjoys torturing people. Thankfully though, the game does at-least give you the option to play through the whole campaign in 4 player co-op.

A nice touch to the campaign is the range of locations you are dog fighting in, whether it be over the skyline of Chicago or out in the middle of no where trying to destroy some radars – all looking pretty damn nice and varied, as long as you don’t look at the ground as it still looks like a painting with a few 3d objects nailed on top of it.

After each mission and enemy you neutralize, you gain experience which goes towards ranking up your pilot. There are 40 levels in total, needing more and more experience to level up each time – after each level you’ll (usually) unlock a new weapon packs and planes – each being better in there own areas, some planes being better at handling and others faster etc. Weapon packs are a nice addition to the game, within these there are variety of rockets and missiles.

It’s very rare (and well… quite hard) to add new features to a flight game, as there’s no real way of changing things and adding major new features without turning the game ridiculous by letting the planes turn into submarines in the blink of an eye. HAWX has actually managed to do the near enough impossible by adding a feature called assistance off, basically it pulls the camera right back and of to the side where you can see the plane and everything around it, plus it dramatically changes how the planes handle. Instead of them turning quite slowly, there able to literally do a complete u-turn in mid air and destroy the pesky bastard who has been trying to lock onto your plane for the past 5 minutes.

The main problem I’ve always had with any form of flying game whether it be a military-dog fighting game or a flight simulator, the plane your in can be traveling faster than the sound barrier yet it doesn’t feel it. Not only does it not feel like it, it doesn’t even sound like it, you’d expect there to be a permanent roar from the massive jet engines – yet there is near enough nothing, if there were birds in the game it wouldn’t surprise me if you could hear them over the engines.

As well as a mediocre single player and co-op, HAWX also features a multiplayer deathmatch/team deathmatch where players can dog fight there way to victory. But I’m going to tell you now, don’t expect to spend long in the games multiplayer as there is very little to do and gets incredibly tedious as all that happens in every single damn match is players fly in circles as that’s the only easy way to dodge rockets (other than flares – obviously).

Tom Clancy’s HAWX is easily the best attempt at a flight game this generation, beating games like Ace Combat and Blazing Angels by a mile but don’t take that as a compliment Ubisoft, neither of those games were good either. It looks decent, plays very well and the assistance is a nice new feature for the genre, yes there could be a lot of improvements but when comparing it to the flight games which are available to date it’s one of the best. If this genre is game is your sort of thing, you are going to be touching yourself as HAWX is the flying game you’ve been wanting – but if the genre isn’t you thing, your going to be hanging yourself with the controller after the first few missions due to how repetitive it is.

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