Flying the Unfriendly Skies
Tom Clancy’s HAWX (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) puts you in the cockpit of the world’s most renowned and capable jet fighters. Over fifty licensed planes including everything from the F-16 Fighting Falcon to the F-22 Raptor to the F-117 Nighthawk are all at your disposal (as you earn them in the campaign that is). Before nose diving into everything I liked about HAWX, let me first say that on the Normal (default) difficulty, this particular Tom Clancy game is one of the more unrealistic ones as your jet fighter can sustain an unrealistic amount of damage and you can carry an insane amount of ordinance (well over one hundred missiles, for example). The other two difficulty settings available immediately from the start, Hard and Elite, reduce the amount of ammo and damage you can sustain, but just know going in that the realism factor is a bit loose in HAWX.
That said, HAWX still offers a good amount of realism and is certainly able to re-create that familiar near-future, high tension, military atmosphere and feel that most Tom Clancy games have. The campaign actually begins around 2012 with the player being portrayed as David Crenshaw, an ace pilot in the US Air Force and head of the elite HAWX squadron. With the help of your two wingmen (which you have some basic control over, more on that soon), you begin the eighteen mission long campaign by helping carry out some missions over Mexico, including helping a team of Ghosts out of a hairy situation.
Unfortunately, despite a successful history, the HAWX squadron is being decommissioned. However, in this near-future scenario, more countries around the world are starting to employee the services of PMCs, or Private Military Contractors. One such PMC, Artemis Security, is highly interested in the three HAWX pilots and is able to secure their employment. For much of the campaign, about half of it, gamers will carry out missions for Artemis that include combat in the Middle East, Caribbean, and near Brazil, where a critical point in the story takes place.
Before each mission, be it for the Air Force or Artemis, players are shown the mission name and a breakdown of what kinds of enemy forces are expected, represented in percentages. For example, you might face a mission with fifty-three percent ground forces, another twenty-five percent in air (i.e., enemy aircraft), and the remaining amount in naval craft or SAM sites. Next up is a brief cutscene where your commander gives you a rundown of the mission. After this, you can choose your difficulty, plane, and then a Weapon Pack. I thought it was nice that the game will allow you to select any plane you have unlocked, but it also has a “recommended” plane that should work great for the mission. Each plane includes a rating for armor, air-to-air, and air-to-ground capability. You can also just admire each plane and look its exterior over while choosing (similar to selecting a car in a racing game title).
Once you have your plane picked out, the last step is to choose your Weapon Pack. Once again, the game will recommend one but you can also choose something different if you desire. The Weapon Pack details what types of ordinance you will carry into battle in addition to your standard (machine gun) cannon. Most times you will take the basic JStrike missile that is described as “fire and forget,” meaning that once you achieve Target Lock, the missile should find its way to the target and at least do some significant damage. In addition to the JStrike missiles, you will also carry a second type of arm like radar guided missiles, rockets, or bombs.
Controls & Mechanics
After a sub-thirty second load time, the mission begins. It’s worth noting that should you prefer to not jump right into the campaign, you can choose to enter a Free Flight mode from the main menu. You might decide to do that to get a “head start” on the controls, but frankly I found the controls in HAWX to be well laid out and easy to pick up; I had no trouble getting right into the action and enjoying myself. You can view the controls in the manual or in the Pause menu at any time, but here’s what you have: left stick controls the plane movement, L1 and R1 control the yaw, L3 launches flares, R3 changes camera view (3rd person to 1st), and right analog stick lets you look around your cockpit. Circle is used for firing your cannon, X to fire primary (hold for weapon camera), Triangle to switch targets, Square for ERS (more on this shortly), Left/Right D-pad to command your wingmen, and up and down changes your primary weapon. Lastly, L2 brakes, R2 accelerates, and you can double tap either to turn Assistance On and Off, a very important and very cool mechanic to the game. Also, SIXAXIS controls are supported, but off by default, and you can also issue voice commands by holding down R1 and L1 to control ten different functions like shooting, launching flares, enabling ERS, and so forth. For my use, I did not enable SIXAXIS and did not use voice commands and everything worked very well.
Before talking about some of the mechanics and gameplay elements in HAWX, I would like to mention the HUD that you will work with during play. By default, the game is in 3rd person mode, but you can change to a cockpit view, or a “control panel” view simply by pressing R3. After some experimenting, the default view worked best for me. In the lower left corner of the screen is your TACMAP, an informative, easy to use map of the mission space. Your TACMAP will show you vital information like the position and movements of enemy and friendly units. For friendly units, like those that you escort and protect in certain missions, you can view their flight pattern which is helpful in knowing where they will be and when. The TACMAP also shows the perimeter or effective range of certain things like SAM sites and early-warning radar systems. These are represented with yellow or red circles, which you will also see in-game, so avoiding those hot spots is a lot easier and requires no guess-work. Lastly, you can expand the size of the TACMAP simply by pressing Select; when you do so, the map doubles to take up roughly an eighth of the screen, great for a quick look while still allowing you to keep your eyes on the sky.
In the center of the screen are your typical altitude meter, “cross hair”, and distance to target meter. The lower right corner shows you the currently armed weapon and your plane’s health status (represented by a number between 0-100). The upper left corner shows you a picture of your currently selected target as well as the current state of your wingmen – either they are heading to attack your selected target or they are defending you, and you can direct them to do either simply by pressing Left or Right on the d-pad. Lastly, in the top center of the screen you will get periodic update (Objective Complete, Checkpoint, etc), while the top right screen serves as the video comm between you and your commander or wingmen. I went into some detail to describe the HUD here, and the ultimate reason for that was to point out that the HUD is very nicely designed. All of the information you need is presented cleanly and efficiently and while still looking very cool.
Going into HAWX, having had some experience over the years with different aerial combat games, I was a little concerned about how well the air-to-air combat was going to work. In most aerial combat games I’ve played, like Descent Freespace and Dark Horizon, and several others, one thing that was always a real pain was being able to track your enemy and take them out. You could easily spend several minutes trying to catch up to and track your enemy for that death blow, and meanwhile your other mission objective(s) goes to hell. Well, one really great feature in HAWX, that is probably in other games too that I just haven’t played, is the ERS. In HAWX, the ERS (Enhanced Reality System) has a distinctive offensive and defensive purpose. On offense, if there is an enemy fighter nearby, in the center of your HUD a small notification will pop-up with a picture of the Square icon from your controller and the word “Intercept.” Should you press Square, these cool light blue triangles will appear on your screen along with a timer. The idea is that you fly through these blue gates and so long as you stay within the gates or only leave their path for a few seconds, at the end of the countdown timer you will have a momentary great shot (Target Lock) at the enemy fighter. Most times this ERS path takes anywhere from five to thirty seconds, but the end reward is an all but assured Target Lock on your enemy.
On the defensive side of the coin, you can use ERS to evade a missile lock on your plane. Flares also work, but are worth saving, while random evasive maneuvers may not always be quick enough. With ERS, a dark red series of triangular gates pop-up on screen for you to fly through. These normally last only five seconds or so and save your plane from a tremendous amount of damage.
Sometimes ERS isn’t enough though and you need an extra edge. To this end the developers of HAWX created a very cool and interesting gameplay element simply known as Off Mode, referring to the onboard computer assistance being switched to off, so that dangerous maneuvers are possible. You can switch Assistance Off and On with a simple double-tap of L2 or R2, at any time during play. When you turn Assistance Off, you will hear a computerized voice telling you so but the screen also changes. Your HUD disappears and you will see your plane in a zoomed out third person view. In this mode, you can perform super-sharp turns that greatly help in fighting the best pilots of the enemy. Players can also perform stalls to send their planes falling like a rock towards the surface should you need to lose a lot of altitude in a hurry. It’s no wonder that the game includes a recording feature given how great some of the Off combat sequences look.
Being able to maneuver like a fish in water has its obvious advantages, but it doesn’t mean much if you aren’t bringing the pain to the enemy; and bring it you will, in a variety of ways. Each mission has you outfitted with two types of primary weapons and your trusty cannon, but the cannon really isn’t all that useful or necessary to be honest. Instead, you will be firing your primary weapons including arms like JStrike missiles, radar-guided missiles, Multi-AA missiles, rocket packs, and bombs. Each weapon operates somewhat differently, but all are fired with X. For Multi-AA missiles, you can actually target up to four enemies at once and launch four missiles with a single command. It’s really satisfying to see four Target Lock icons pop up on screen and know that one press of the fire button is going to send a missile screaming towards them. Bombs are also a lot of fun in that the reticule for these show a large circular area painted on the ground, indicating where the bomb will impact and damage. Radar guided missiles are unique and cool in that you have to keep the target inside of the reticule during the time that the rocket is in transit, which can be several seconds as these babies have a very long effective range.
Other Thoughts
HAWX may not be realistic in terms of your sustainable damage and ordinance capabilities, at least on the default difficulty, but one area of realism that you can really appreciate is the terrain. Thanks to GeoEye, a satellite imagery firm, the terrain you will fly over in HAWX is actually quite realistic and accurate to its real life counterpart. This may not make a lot of difference for most gamers in the non-US based missions, but towards the end of the game when you’re flying through American airspace, it’s really cool to be able to check out the terrain and see plenty of real landmarks and so forth.
While the terrain may be accurate, I can’t say that it’s all that pretty when you get very close to it. Overall, make no mistake, HAWX is a very good looking game, but it’s not quite outstanding or particularly amazing. I didn’t experience any technical issues on the PS3 as far as framerate issues or clipping, etc, but it just isn’t as crisp and gorgeous as it could be. The audio presentation on the other hand is just fine – I liked the voiceovers and the effects a lot, especially during the especially intense missions where you have a Ghost team leader barking in your ear along with your wingmen and Commander. Target lock sounds, explosions and the rest of the effects are great too, while the ambient music is fitting and good, like most Tom Clancy titles.
Yet another nice aspect to the campaign is the missions themselves. I thought the developers did a good job of making sure you knew what the objectives were and how close you were to completing or failing those objectives. Also, most missions don’t go as initially planned, which keeps the story interesting and you on your toes as objectives often change mid-mission. Checkpoints during missions are set at well-spaced intervals to keep redundancy to a minimum, although most missions you can get through on your first try.
During the campaign, you earn experience points for every enemy kill you get as well as hitting certain milestones like avoiding so many enemy missiles, hitting so many enemies with bombs or rockets, and so forth. When you hit these marks you earn an additional experience points boost that is tallied along with the mission complete bonus at the end of the mission. Experience points earn you new promotions and therefore you unlock more aircraft and Weapon Packs that you can use in multiplayer, or any time during the campaign. There are forty ranks to achieve that take you from basic Airman all the way up to General of the Air Force.
The campaign is enjoyable enough that it’s worth a second or even third trip through on the harder difficulties, especially with your unlocked capabilities. This can earn you more Trophies and also experience that you can use in multiplayer. Multiplayer modes include a neat drop in/drop out four player co-op mode which operates just how it sounds. Of course there are also competitive modes like a basic Versus mode where you can tackle a friend or stranger on your LAN or over the PSN.
Multiplayer action spans Ranked and Player (Friendly) matches as well, and also includes a Team Deathmatch mode. I haven’t spent a great deal of time with this mode yet, but basically it’s one team versus another with some interesting Support Elements available to players who are obtaining points. These additional abilities can only be used one at a time and include things like an EMP Strike which causes all enemy planes to stall temporarily. Additionally you can earn and use: AWACS Support (for improved missile range and effectiveness for your entire team), Repair Drones (slowly repair damaged ally craft, but can be targeted and destroyed), Jamming (makes it very hard for enemies to target your team), Radar Suppression (makes your team invisible), Missile Restriction (enemy team can only use unguided missiles for a brief time), and a Cannon upgrade (range and damage of your team’s cannons are upgraded).
With that, let’s get to the summary…