One of the games taking a lower profile at E3 was the new Tom Clancy branded air combat game, HAWX. The fact that it's not coming out until next year might be part of that, but the build that I got a chance to play at Ubisoft's floor booth was a lot more fun than I'd expected it to be (especially with that unfortunate name).
If you look at the first screenshot, you'll see how I spent most of the end of the demo. But let me get to that point first.
Basically, HAWX takes place around the time of the Ghost Recon series, but instead of being a groundpounder, you're pounding the ground with high explosives from high up. The scenario up for demonstration at E3 had three main parts: shoot down some bombers, blow up some ground targets, and lastly dogfight the heck out of four aces.
From what I was led to believe, the developers had made the game a bit easier by giving you additional missiles - I know that at one point it looked like I had 200 (a ridiculous number by realistic standards). When I finished, I had 12, if that tells you anything.
The very nice woman demonstrating the game was in the middle of the shoot-out with the aces, but in order to help me get familiar with the game, she reset it back to the beginning. I found myself flying in over Rio de Janeiro, as built by the same technology as used for Google Maps, so it was extremely geographically accurate. I quickly found that I didn't have time to do much sight-seeing as I immediately had to lock and destroy a few bombers while dealing with their defenders.
That taught me the basics fairly quickly. For attacking, you want to fly in first person mode. You select your target and once you have a lock on, just tap a button to launch your missile(s). You do have cannons, also, but those will be much less used.
However, once someone locks onto you, you'll want to do one of two things — launch flares or dodge. Launching flares is easy but you only have seven of them (in the demo). Unfortunately for me, you launch them when you press the left stick too hard, so I quickly used mine up, though they were completely effective against whatever air-to-air missiles the defending F-14As launched at me.
The rest of my time was spent switched into third person mode and attempting to dodge missiles using a combination of careful maneuvering and afterburners. You can do that also while in first person mode but it's much harder; on the other hand, it's much harder to get a solid lock-on on an enemy plane while in third person mode. Offense or defense, basically - it's your call.
That led to the biggest complaint I really had about the game - it's one button to switch into one mode, a different button to switch out. I'd have much rather have it be more of a "toggle" button, where the same button switched modes for me.
Next up were ground targets such as boats and tanks. This showed me the value of the targeting system.
When you have a clear target you can hit the "X" button. This will bring up a line of diamonds that you fly through. Flying through them will almost definitely make sure that you have a solid lock on your target. You don't always need to do that; however, if a tank (for instance) is hiding between skyscrapers, it will make it easier for you to do a high flying loop and come down, missiles blazing, to turn him into debris.
After that it turned into a four on one dogfight, with me against four Su-27s (if I remember correctly). I was out of flares and so I spent most of my time in third person mode, dodging and juking against missile after incoming missile. Occasionally, if I was lucky, I'd manage to get a targeting lock, and I'd toss off a pair of missile at the enemy plane.
It probably took me closer to ten minutes, but once you whittled down the first couple of planes, you could spend more and more time in first person mode and really take the others to task.
HAWX is not a strict flight simulator. What it is, despite the dumb name, is an incredibly fun flight combat game that will have you turbo-boosting out of a steep dive down the highways of a city, or nearly bottoming out on the ocean, as you swap missiles and cannon fire with a numerically superior but technologically and tactically inferior foe. I'd hesitate to call it a strict arcade game, but the real question will be the ammo limits, in my opinion. If the missions aren't as long as the one I played, and the missile ammo more realistic, it will be quite the addition to the Tom Clancy franchise. If it stays the way it is, it's still going to be a lot of fun, but it won't necessarily follow the realistic military technology feel that other Tom Clancy games, such as Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon share.
I'm a 29 year old senior network and systems engineer for a consulting firm in the DC area. I'm mostly into MMOs and FPSes (on the console), and I'm a big pro football fan. In my other spare time I like to write and tend to read copious amounts of history and military sci-fi. I'm also into cooking and bad action movies.
