HAWX appears to try to blend realism and arcade gaming within a single game. But does it really succeed? A short review to find out:
The combat component is a fair amount of fun. It's very satisfying to get a lock on an enemy aircraft and then watch as your missiles blow it to smithereens in mid-air in a very satisfying explosion. The graphics are really good, and if you get to fly through the black smoke that moments ago was an enemy plane, well, that's just a lot more fun. The negative is that locking on to the most ideal target is a pain in the ass. It's not as intuitive as one would have liked. It's not fair to expect that the AI would select the best target that's right in front of you. Yet, multiple times, while I feel like there's an obvious target in front of me, I hit the change target button to find that the computer's locked on to something else, and those brief milli-seconds of confusion will cause you to miss your target, forcing you to fly around a second time.
The AI also fails in directing you to the most important targets. So you get to hear on the radio that a certain "bogey" is high priority, but in some missions, there are so many enemy aircraft (or ground units) in the fray that it becomes difficult trying to figure out which ones is high priority. This is especially annoying when you have to escort certain slower and less armed aircraft (such as bombers or carriers), and the oncoming wall of enemies gets so high that you just don't realise that an enemy aircraft has slipped through and is attacking your bomber. Oh, and it's not a major help that the wingmen do not branch out and attack very effectively, even if you ask them to. The "Assistance Off" feature allows camera to pan out to an external view, letting you see your plane (and your target) from the sky. It can be fun when you get the hang of it, albeit quite simplistic. Just my opinion, though, but I felt that the simplicity was for the better.
The missions are quite varied, some requiring low altitude flying, others requiring precision flying to avoid enemy radar zones. Almost no mission goes according to plan, and just when you thought you had completed it, something new will happen and will require further action from you. There's a storyline in the background that, to be fair, does a good job of giving you a reason to fly from one mission to the next. But with the lack of character models, with nothing to really bring a "human" element into the picture, it kind of falls flat and you just want to hit the "Continue" button to start the mission already. For those who are interested, the storyline involves Private Military Corporations (PMC), which are supposedly the future or armed forces.
Graphics are good, to put it succinctly. Watching your plane's wings change as you change speed or altitude is fun and the third-person view is satisfying in that it allows you to see the machine you're flying.
All in all, HAWX is a good game that does a good job of balancing arcade style gaming with some elements of realism, but its biggest failing is that it's just not immersive enough. The missions, at least initially, can be quite slow (before a sudden ratcheting up of pressure and offensive), and the storyline is bland without a character to relate to it. After a couple of missions, I just felt like taking a break.
The combat component is a fair amount of fun. It's very satisfying to get a lock on an enemy aircraft and then watch as your missiles blow it to smithereens in mid-air in a very satisfying explosion. The graphics are really good, and if you get to fly through the black smoke that moments ago was an enemy plane, well, that's just a lot more fun. The negative is that locking on to the most ideal target is a pain in the ass. It's not as intuitive as one would have liked. It's not fair to expect that the AI would select the best target that's right in front of you. Yet, multiple times, while I feel like there's an obvious target in front of me, I hit the change target button to find that the computer's locked on to something else, and those brief milli-seconds of confusion will cause you to miss your target, forcing you to fly around a second time.
The AI also fails in directing you to the most important targets. So you get to hear on the radio that a certain "bogey" is high priority, but in some missions, there are so many enemy aircraft (or ground units) in the fray that it becomes difficult trying to figure out which ones is high priority. This is especially annoying when you have to escort certain slower and less armed aircraft (such as bombers or carriers), and the oncoming wall of enemies gets so high that you just don't realise that an enemy aircraft has slipped through and is attacking your bomber. Oh, and it's not a major help that the wingmen do not branch out and attack very effectively, even if you ask them to. The "Assistance Off" feature allows camera to pan out to an external view, letting you see your plane (and your target) from the sky. It can be fun when you get the hang of it, albeit quite simplistic. Just my opinion, though, but I felt that the simplicity was for the better.
The missions are quite varied, some requiring low altitude flying, others requiring precision flying to avoid enemy radar zones. Almost no mission goes according to plan, and just when you thought you had completed it, something new will happen and will require further action from you. There's a storyline in the background that, to be fair, does a good job of giving you a reason to fly from one mission to the next. But with the lack of character models, with nothing to really bring a "human" element into the picture, it kind of falls flat and you just want to hit the "Continue" button to start the mission already. For those who are interested, the storyline involves Private Military Corporations (PMC), which are supposedly the future or armed forces.
Graphics are good, to put it succinctly. Watching your plane's wings change as you change speed or altitude is fun and the third-person view is satisfying in that it allows you to see the machine you're flying.
All in all, HAWX is a good game that does a good job of balancing arcade style gaming with some elements of realism, but its biggest failing is that it's just not immersive enough. The missions, at least initially, can be quite slow (before a sudden ratcheting up of pressure and offensive), and the storyline is bland without a character to relate to it. After a couple of missions, I just felt like taking a break.