HAWX

H.A.W.X. (henceforth “HAWX”, ‘cuz seriously) is awesome.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a brilliant game, but I’ve found it enormously entertaining. I’ll concede that a very large part of the credit for my enjoyment is due to the HOTAS setup I bought before christmas, but HAWX – like the Blazing Angels games also from Ubisoft Romania – fills the gaping hole in the game medium that you might call the “action flight game”.

I’ve written before about my craving for flight games with a more arcadish than simulating approach to flying, and HAWX certainly fits the bill. There are no red-outs or black-outs, there’s no stalling as long as you keep your flight computer on, you can carry enough missiles on a mission to remove a small country from the surface of the planet, you have unlimited fuel, and the flight model is extremely simple.

The main problem with such a simple flight model is that dog-fights usually end up consisting of two planes endlessly circling each other, but HAWX fixes this by introducing two new gimmicks: The “Assistance Off” mode allows you to turn off the flight computer to perform some frankly preposterous maneuvers which are none-the-less pretty much possible to carry out in real life, and its “ERS” feature makes the flight computer draw gates in the air for you to fly through to get in position to bomb a concealed ground target, intercept an enemy fighter, or dodge an incoming missile.

Assistance Off is fun. Before I played the PC demo, I was concerned that it might not work very well on a joystick, and I must say it’s very obvious that it was designed for a gamepad – it’s far easier to maneuver in Assistance Off on the X-Box than it is with a joystick on the PC. It’s still good fun though, when you get used to it – the far-away camera perspective confuses initially, but it’s actually pretty useful for keeping both you and your target in view during a dogfight. Moreover it makes you look amazingly awesome, which is an important feature in a game about being cool in a fighter jet.

ERS is more neat than useful – I found myself using it very little during the campaign, but there are definitely some situations where the ERS makes your life easier. The best thing about it is one mission where your ERS is repurposed to show you a safe route through a ridiculous network of anti-air defences over a base you’re sent to bomb. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so epically heroic and talented before, flying my F-117 through a twisting route 200 meters over the ground, missiles whooshing past me and the flight computer repeating the words “Missile evaded” over and over again.

That’s what really sold HAWX to me: Not the Assistance Off mode, not the ERS, but the incredible variation in missions. Sure, most of your time is spent dogfighting or bombing ground targets, but your objectives range from escort missions and perimeter defence (which surprisingly rarely get frustrating) to precision bombing and major air battles.

Most importantly though, the game occasionally throws you a really awesome mission with the help of some blatantly sci-fi near-future plot points. In one mission, you’re flying a Eurofighter Typhoon under the radar to bomb some installments surrounding a control facility for the US missile defence system. When you enter the radius of a radar, the game paints it as a big red cylinder 1500 meters in the air that you have to stay beneath, maneuvering between the mountains to take out the SAM sites and disable the defence installations. It’s preposterous, but it’s brilliant fun.

The final feature that gives the game extra longevity is an experience system whereby you’re awarded experience points every time you make a kill or complete a mission on a specific difficulty, with huge extra XP bonuses awarded when you unlock an achievement such as killing 50 enemies with all-aspect missiles or in Assistance Off mode or taking out 8 targets with one cluster bomb. Unfortunately a lot of these are tied to multiplayer, and I’m not sure when I’ll have the patience to give that part of the game a shot – I prefer to play with people I know, but I don’t know anybody who has HAWX.

When you have enough XP, you’re promoted to the next rank which unlocks new planes or new payloads for your old planes. If, like me, you never grew out of your childhood fascination with jet planes, you’ll get a kick out of unlocking better and more awesome planes. I giggled like a little girl when I unlocked the F-35 Lightning II and the F-22 Raptor, and I can’t wait to get the JAS 39 Gripen or the F-18 HARV.

The hilarious twist is that the actual gameplay difference between these planes is negligible – some of them have electronic warfare capabilities which apparently makes them outrageously overpowered in multiplayer, they all carry different payloads, and the A-10 has a stupidly dangerous cannon, but they all pretty much feel the same to fly. The fact that there’s no major difference in feel between flying a bomber or an air-superiority fighter is a little disappointing, but it could well be a question of multiplayer balance. Crucially, my collector’s compulsion is enough to drive me towards unlocking more planes, even if they’re not noticeably different from the ones I already have.

The game has a few problems, sure. It tends to crash a bit too much on my machine – I won’t blame Ubisoft entirely for that one, seeing how almost all the modern games I have seem to crash a lot on my PC (we’ll see if the problem persists when I install the new GeForce GTX 260 I’ve ordered and switch entirely to Windows 7), but I just wish it wouldn’t crash or freeze quite so much right as I’ve finished a mission, before it saves my progress. I’m also not too happy with the abundance of timed missions and escort missions, but they only ever gave me a problem twice during the campaign, so I’ll let them off the hook. As I’ve mentioned, it would be nice if there were a greater difference between the planes – particularly, you should be able to tell the ground support planes apart from the air-superiority fighters. I’m also sorely missing take-offs and landings, which is something that featured in a pleasingly simple form in both the Blazing Angels games.

The bottom line, however, is that HAWX is fun. If you like planes and if you want to feel like you’re flying a bleeding-edge death machine without having to read a big-ass manual just to learn to take off without crashing, if you prefer blowing up dozens of enemies per mission over any actual realism, and if you have a joystick or a gamepad, consider giving HAWX a try. There’s a demo both for PC and for X-Box, and it actually shows off the game pretty well. And if you get it on Steam, let me know, and we’ll fire up some co-op or a bit of the old team deathmatch and farm for achievements.