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Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Romania
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ryan Asher
The Tom Clancy brand is dominating the ground war with its impressive Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series, and now it’s looking for air superiority with HAWX. In HAWX, you trade in your MP5 for a seat in the cockpits of some of the nastiest fighter jets in the world. I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty decent trade once you make the sound barrier your “female dog” for the first time.
Coincidentally enough, your mission as a jet fighter pilot in HAWX is to fight other jets…with missiles…and Kenny Loggins. You can also blow up other things such as gun emplacements and bases, but I never understood that. What’s the point of crushing my opponent if I can’t give him or her (I don’t discriminate) a flying head start? Regardless, there really isn’t much to HAWX besides the traditional air-combat formula: fly to combat zone; fight; air-five your frat boy-like comrades after sweet, delicious victory.
 When you’re not in game, though, HAWX strays far from the traditional aerial dog fighting sim by including a decent story. You play as an almost nondescript airman who seeks a higher paycheck by joining one of the many private military corporations of the near future. The overall story takes a few missions to develop, much like the actual gameplay, but it’s certainly engaging once it hits the afterburners. If you don’t want to mess with storylines, you can jump online with other wannabe Red Barons. There’s a four-player coop feature and a versus dogfight mode. Both ran exceptionally well, even in the most heated moments.
Among the few things HAWX does well are the plot and a nifty third-person flying feature. Instead of flying aimless circles trying to catch your prey, you can turn off flight assistance in the middle of dogfights for better maneuverability. Your view changes to a distant third-person perspective (almost like an aerial strategy game) and you can perform corkscrews and high-angle turns on a dime. This feature makes the dog fighting that much more intense, but it isn’t introduced until a third of the way into the game. Much like everything else in HAWX, it takes way too long to develop.
 HAWX really makes you work to get to the good stuff. There are 19 missions spread throughout the fairly lengthy full campaign, but most of them are either tedious or boring. There are far too many escort missions (I don’t know about you, but I only care about myself; I don’t need to babysit some “Mr. President”), and all too often you’re forced to travel from one part of the map to the other, just to engage the incoming enemies. There are too many dead spots, and the game has no real pacing.
While coop does liven up the rather dull campaign, especially if you’re playing with some friends on Live, there still just isn’t much that’s sexy about HAWX. The dog fighting with flight assistance turned off can be intense at times, but those moments are few and far between. While lighting up bogeys over the skies of Chicago is nifty, it’s not enough to make you want to kick the tires and light the fires.
Our Score: 
Our Recommendation: 
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Just for the record, the third-person OFF mode is unlocked in mission 5. Considering there’s 19 missions in the full campaign, that’s more like a quarter than a third, isn’t it? Aside from that, I agree with pretty much all of what Ryan said.
And if you actually served in the Air Force, like I did, you have to check your sense of realism at the door. Believe me… I only *wish* my F-15 could carry 240 missiles and unlimited cannon ammo! I had to settle for 8 missiles and 940 rounds of ammo… never mind the fact that some of the aircraft, like the YF-12 (aka, the Blackbird) NEVER had weapons, and others (like the EF-111 Raven) carried only two missiles and no cannon. Every aircraft in the game (and there are a LOT of them) have at least one cannon and enough missiles to supply four air wings.
Oh, two more complaints: A total lack of an altitude readout in OFF mode makes achieving some of the challenges… like “fly below 30 meters in OFF mode without crashing”… very difficult at best, almost impossible at worst. You also have no autopilot of any kind, not even a key that levels out your plane so you can hold a level altitude. This makes some of the -other- challenges, like “Fly inverted below 40 meters for 2 minutes without crashing” that much harder, too.
And, if you’re interested in HAWX only for the single-player experience, don’t expect to unlock everything without downloading an unlocker. When you complete a mission in campaign mode, it’s available in single mission mode, and you can re-play those missions with different aircraft and/or weapons loadouts as often as you need to complete the single-player challenges.
You’ll shoot up through the lower ranks pretty quickly, but once you reach level 25 or so, it requires so many XP to advance to the next rank that it becomes a long, boring grind. You’ll only get to level 27, or maybe 28, by completing all the campaign missions at Elite difficulty and completing all the single-player challenges. After that, you have to go into team deathmatch mode and start completing the TDM challenges, or get used to playing the same mission over… and over… and over… and over again, to get up to rank 40 (the highest rank in the game).
Just as a general rule of thumb, once you’ve completed a mission at Elite difficulty, further replays of most missions only gain 500 or 600 XP for destroying targets. But just to get from rank 25 to rank 26 requires almost 12,000 XP… so you’d have to replay a high-scoring mission 10 to 12 times to advance, and it gets worse as you climb the ranks.
Is it a fun game? Yes. I agree with Ryan’s assessment of “Play it!” … especially if you ARE interested in the multi-player aspect. If you only care about the single-player experience and you’re a completionist… download an unlocker, that’s my advice.
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