The Sum of All Profits
Jack Ryan is a CIA agent who must protect his country and his freedom from evil Soviet threats using only his wits and high intellect amidst pressures from US government agents and…no, nevermind. Ubi Soft outright bought the rights to the Tom Clancy name and all properties within it, thus giving them free reign to create Tom Clancy strategy games, Tom Clancy aerial combat games, Tom Clancy’s Extreme Skateboarding, etc. Tom Clancy’s HAW-X takes the video game franchise that already strayed far away from the original fiction and adds about 80,000 feet of altitude to the distance of separation from Red October.
You play as a one of a group of former military pilots from the HAW-X team (and I do hate bad acronyms) who joins Artemis, one of those Private Military Companies that Hideo Kojima was preaching against in Metal Gear Solid 4. You fly anyone of a collection of unlockable jets…and I’ll get this out of the way; by playing all of the game’s modes and killing targets, you collect experience points used to improve your ranking and unlock assorted goods in another take of the Call of Duty 4 perk system that I am so painfully indifferent too. Every time you shoot a tank/jet/anything down, the game gives you XP for this. Has World of Warcraft really instilled the notion into gamers that grinding levels for “XP” is fun? Really? This is billed as a high-action aerial warfare game.
Back to HAW-X, you fly your choice of any given unlockable plane, and you complete a series of missions that can comprise of anything from “kill X number of targets” to “protect/escort something from X number of targets” to “kill many, many targets” and…well the range of mission objectives isn’t quite as broad as one would hope. There are way too many protect/escort missions, and I would have hoped that game developers would’ve learned to nix them after the Rogue Squadron days, but alas. But that said, I didn’t mind them as I never found myself failing due to a stray enemy that escaped my ballistic wrath, and someone out there will probably geek out over the prevalence of missions asking you to protect the Ghost Recon team at least.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around whether or not HAW-X is trying to be a flight simulation. In fact, this could be the game’s greatest fallacy. The planes are all real even if they all handle roughly the same, the worlds and locations may as well be based on Google maps, and the Tom Clancy name hints at, or at least used to hint at, the idea that of real world political turmoil. But small rebel insurgent groups and terrorist organizations shouldn’t be so well-armed; one of the first missions has you battling a terrorist group that seems willing to send about 30 tanks, ten jet fighters and bombers to destroy a small oil refinery in the middle of nowhere. It’s almost as illogical as how your fighter jet is capable of holding about 200 missiles, or about $144,000,000 worth of firepower per mission. This Artemis company has to be wealthier than most first world countries to have that kind of cash lying around to spend on protecting a meager oil refinery.
And I guess years of gaming and hoarding ammo and power-ups have made me less likely to question how a plane can wield about 20 times its weight in missiles.
So the above quantities of munitions and enemies to incinerate are reason enough to think that the developers intended a more accessible, arcade style of gameplay with HAW-X, and so are the simplified controls. Besides not needing a keyboard, a flight joystick and the Microsoft brand on the cover, the controls are somewhat streamlined. The core gameplay involves you flying towards a target, your computer striving to get a lock on a target, and then firing and depriving a family of their pilot caretaker. Sure there are land bombs, rockets and other munitions, including a gun turret, but for the most part you’ll be dependent of your lock-on missiles. There are a few nice little twists to the formula, both of which have their own acronyms and thus make them almost as pretentious as the EA Sports Cutman. ERS lets you, when prompted, press the square button to show you a flight path that you can follow to either shake an incoming missile, go behind a target or take the safest approach to an anti-air cannon.
If you feel like this is an insult to your intelligence, then the assistance OFF function will be more to your liking. With a quick and not-always-responsive double tap of the shoulder buttons, you’ll flip off the automatic settings on the plane that prevent you from making poor piloting decisions, and the camera pans far away to give you a stylish look of the action. Here, you can make unusually sharp turns to dodge missiles or sneak up on enemies, but you’re also prone to stalling the plane and falling to your death if not careful.
Combined, the dogfighting in general feels rather…sluggish. The planes feel slow and ill-responsive and your gun turret is useless, relegating plane combat to two enemies chasing each other, looking for a lock. While the Assistance OFF function is something new, it feels inefficient and risky in comparison to the ERS system or simply doing a loop in the air. The online competitive multiplayer, which is restricted to 4 on 4 team deathmatches, seem to emphasize this fact to me, though it’s hard for me to be concrete about such a statement with so few people playing the PS3 version online. The same issue came up with the co-op play, which allows up to four people to play online.
Tom Clancy’s HOCK-X perhaps suffers the most from being subjected to the Tom Clancy license. The recent batch of Clancy-verse games have toiled with finding a mix between realism and accessibility, but HAW-X suffers from getting the worst of both worlds. The mechanics are too simple to appeal to flight simulator fans, and the gameplay is too sluggish and uninteresting for someone that just wants to see fireworks made of steel and burnt flesh in the sky. Unless you’ve got some kind of unnatural obsession with anything that has Mr. Clancy’s name on it, then pass this one up and search your bargain bins for Crimson Skies or any number of space shooters that involve talking animals; they’re about as deep as HAW-X but plenty more amusing.
3 stars
