Let me preface this review by saying that I didn't get to play this nearly as long as I wanted to because of the aforementioned RRoD on my 360 but I did get quite a few hours in the seat...enough to give it a fair review anyway...
The modern flight combat game has been largely ignored in the latest generations of gaming, which is shocking considering the advances in technology, the latest systems really lend themselves perfectly to this style of game. Perhaps we all still cant get the taste out of our mouths from trying to land on the damn aircraft carrier in TOP GUN for the NES, but alas we may finally have a winner in the genre and who better to bring it then Tom Clancy. When you hear the name Tom Clancy in relation to video games you can usually bet you are in for a pretty solid experience. Tom Clancy and UbiSoft have one heck of a track record when it comes to military games, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon have both been around for ages and continue to produce excellent games. However this is a new venture for both parties so what happens when these solid teams take a crack at the flight combat genre....Lets find out.
The first thing you notice when playing HAWX is the presentation is extremely solid. This tends to be the case with Tom Clancy games in this one is no different from the opening movie and the mission briefs the dev team definitely did their homework on this one. It really does an awesome job of bringing you into the game and almost allowing you to forget you are actually playing a game. Which brings us to the game play itself....again the team has done an excellent job not only nailing the flight combat elements but mixing up the game play to keep it fresh. The first mission has you eliminating some threats outside Mexico and then going on to assist a team on the ground to help extract them. Another mission sees you protecting an oil refinery from an oncoming attack. They really do a nice job mixing it up so it doesn't feel like just flying around shooting stuff. One really cool thing that they did was OFF mode. OFF mode basically turns off (get it.... 8) )all the restrictions that would normally be in place while flying a jet, this allows you to pull off some crazy maneuvers but you also have to be careful as its really easy to stall out while doing these which is never a good thing. My one gripe with the game play is the sense of speed, I'm not sure what could be done to improve this, but I never got the feeling of flying at 100's of miles per hour. I wont go into to much detail as the story for two reasons; one, as I said I didn't get to play this one to completion because of my box dying and two just in case you play it yourself I don't want to spoil anything. As for Multi player, this was another little gripe I had, multi player was limited (near as I can tell) to simply playing the single player missions in co-op with up to three other people and most of the time when you join a game you join in the middle of the mission which takes some of the fun out of it. It would have been really nice to see some kind of Dogfight mode where you could just go and fly against other people to really test your skills.
Overall, despite a few minor gripes, Tom Clancy's HAWX is a very well done, very fun game to play. If you are a fan of flight combat or military games I would recommend a BUY IT on this one for everyone else however it gets a......
RENT IT
While its a great game in my eyes it may not be every ones cup of tea. So check it out before you take the full plunge. Check out the following video (just ignore the clear typo in the title....LOL) to get a taste for it.....
