Tom Clancy’s HAWX Demo Impression

 

Ubisoft released a PC demo from the upcoming Tom Clancy’s HAWX flight simulation game and here is my take of it. The demo, like all demos is a little underwhelming with actual content. It comes with one tutorial mission and a combat mission both taking place in Rio De Janeiro.

 

Tom Clancy’s HAWX was developed by Ubisoft Romania and is a multi platform release. This is not a realistic flight simulator but more of an arcade take on the genre. The controls are a little light and movement(using the keyboard) is instant. You can use normal or expert controls that allow you to control more complex things like pitch and yaw while the normal control mode does a good job of presenting an easy to learn control mechanism.

 

 

Arrow keys control the bank or roll of your fighter while the W and S keys control acceleration and brakes. Q and S will allow you to strafe turn. Using your fighters brakes and turning will be the key to most dogfights as you will need to do this to avoid enemy missiles and get your enemy under you target range.

 

Tom Clancy’s HAWX also employs the same voice recognition technology that was in Tom Clancy’s End War. If you have a mic, you can give simple instructions to your wingman as well as turn on or off assistance or other features. It is not as full blown as what was seen in End War and you certainly can’t play HAWX solely with voice command.

 

 

The oddest feature is the assistance whereby turning assistance off actually pulls the camera back to an uncontrollable nearly schmup like camera angle. In this mode, playing the game was frustrating as I found it difficult to judge where I was going or make any sense where my enemies were. For a flight simulation, minute and precise movement is very important and this sort of throws that out of the window.

 

This leads me to my issue with the game. HAWX really feels more like  shooter on a car racing engine. Movements seem imprecise and controls feel too light. This really isn’t a good flight simulation as there are definitely others that are better than this like IL-2 Sturmovik(a WWII flight simulator). The sensation of flying a plane is an important aspect to this genre and HAWX fails in this.

 

 

Which is a crying shame as the game is visually amazing. Presentation is top notch as the detail on the fighters look life like and realistic. A lot of modern day fighters have been modelled very realistically like the MIG and F-14A. Ubisoft used ‘GeoEye’ satelite imagery of actual locations to map the levels in the game. The locales in the game look really good and you feel like you are flying over a city(Rio in the demo).

 

Tom Clancy’s HAWX is not the return of a waning genre. No, flight simulators are not coming back and certainly HAWX isn’t the title that will do that. Its flaws with the controls and camera angle are just too big to call this a proper flight simulator. If seen as an arcade fighter, It doesn’t do better than the Ace Combat series.

 

 

It seems like Ubisoft were in two minds whether to make something more realistic or more arcadish and HAWX essentially end up being this odd amalgamation that  never does anything well. It’s just really pretty.