Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is a fun game. Flying a state-of-the-art combat jet over satellite-rendered landscapes in a game halfway between simulation and twitch thrills just works. The control is simple, the goals basic. But let’s be honest here. You don’t play game about flying a killer plane and look for a reflective experience. You play it for the rush of speed and vertigo, narrow escapes and quick action. H.A.W.X. provides that. Just not enough of it.
Unnecessary or not, there is context for the dogfighting. H.A.W.X. falls between Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2 and EndWar in the arching Tom Clancy timeline. You are David Crenshaw, a one-time USAF pilot who left the military life behind for better pay and hours as a contractor at Artemis Global Security. USAF pilots, in Tom Clancy land, are usually good and private military corporations like Artemis Global are typically bad, so you can probably guess what the big mid-story twist is. Crenshaw, in a cruel twist of fate/genre convention, learns that the sweet life isn’t necessarily the good life. This is Tom Clancy 101, meaningful for fetishists only, since it doesn’t serve much purpose beyond putting you in a plane.
The missions are uniform: you fly the unfriendly skies, zeroing in on yellow targets and protecting green ones. H.A.W.X. keeps the aerial violence speedy with its unique taskmaster, the Enhanced Reality System (ERS). Pressing a button when prompted activates the ERS, creating a tight tunnel of lit checkpoints on screen. By flying through the tunnel, players can intercept pursuing fighters and outfly incoming missiles. It also serves several mission-specific purposes, such as creating a flight path through heavily defended enemy airspace or lining up the correct angle of attack for a covered ground target. The ERS objectives show up infrequently, to great effect. It’s an ecstatic thrill to speed through the tight confines of an ERS tunnel, flak exploding around you, a ringing lock-on buzzer serves keeping you stressfully aware of your safety zone.
Basic flight and ERS are all well and good, but H.A.W.X. is at its best after Assistance OFF mode is introduced, roughly three or four missions into the campaign. Double-tapping either trigger button activates a distant third-person view of the action, and the camera locks itself onto any targeted enemy. You’re left with a greater freedom of movement since the view is no longer restricted to what’s in front of you. The tradeoff is that your jet’s safety features are turned off as well, which means the engine will stall if you lose too much speed. That isn’t a big deal when you’re 50,000 feet in the air, but it’s a bit more worrisome when that number is closer to fifty.
H.A.W.X.’s problem is that there’s just not enough variety. Your time in the cockpit is over and done in just under eight hours, and at the end of it, you’ll only have earned about half of the experience needed to unlock all the game’s extra planes and weapons. H.A.W.X. does support cooperative online multiplayer as well competitive online play for two to eight, and both modes also earn the player experience. The co-op is enjoyable, especially since each player can set his or her own difficulty level, but since competitive play comes in just one flavor, team deathmatch, it does nothing to alleviate the end game doldrums. Compounding the problem of unlocking is that most of the big ticket challenges will have been completed by the time you’ve finished the campaign. With several thousand experience points separating each level, the 5-50 points earned per downed enemy fosters a monotonous grind which will turn most players off. Even then though, there isn’t a whole lot to do with all of those sweet unlocks.
H.A.W.X. desperately wants to be a great game. It gives you these beautiful environments, tons of fun to control fighter jets, little elements that scream “Love me!” Then a handful of hours have passed and you’ve seen all there is to see in the campaign and despaired at the thought of slowly grinding through the last experience levels. You had a little bit of fun, but you can’t help but think it could have been so much more.
Grade: B-
Previous Reviews:
Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride