Tom Clancy games always try to break new ground. The brand already implamented itself into the first person shooter-, third person shooter-, stealth- and real time stategy genres. But now Ubisoft tries something completely different: A combat flightsimulation called HAWX for the Playstation 3, PC and Xbox 360.
You take up the role of David Crinshore, a pilot of the Private Military Company, or short PMC, Artemis. Your job is solving in combat action for whatever faction that hired you and with that don't show any emotions when fighting. The only thing that matters for you is hard cold cash.
In this case Artemis has been hired by the brazilian goverment to protect the city of Rio de Janero from a rebell invasion in a civil war haunting the country for several months.
In the Tom Clancy timeline the game takes place directly after the events of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, and prior to EndWar.
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The Demo gives you acces to two aircrafts: The F-16 and the Harrier Jet, both of which being pretty standard with average ratings in speed, air to air combat and air to ground combat.
Once in the cocpit you have two options how to fly your plane: Assist ON or assist OFF. The first is your standart arcade simulation, viewing the aircraft from third person and featuring a HUD. The second being a more simulation oriented option, taking away the HUD and only showing your plane with a free rotating camera. In that mode you can perform remarkably more moves than with assists turned on, and your jet is alot more agil. You can dodge incoming missles by drifting, meaning hit the break while stearing, making free 180 turns or even enter stall mode which is basicaly free fall.
The big feature of the ON mode however, is that you can hit the X button any time to show a suggest line. This will show you the best way to dodge a missle, intercept another fighter or start a ground attack. Fortunately you can switch between those two modes any time by double-tapping the right or left trigger on your controller.
Combat works basicaly the same in both modes. Depending on the range of your selected weapon you have to get close to a target until the game starts automaticly locking onto it. Finishing it then is as easy as hitting the A button. This works for both rockets and bombs. You can also try to bring down your enemys with machine gun fire, but this is more difficult, because for that you don't have a lock on feature and the bullets do only little damage.
A big part of HAWX is the online co-op. You can play with up to 3 friends via xbox live, and joining a session is managed with a drop in/ drop out system Fable 2 style. It works pretty fluid and lag is kept to a minimum, making the feature a big addition to the game.
Speaking of good additions, the game features a full fletched XP points system. Completing objectives, assisting your allys and killing enemys will all gain you experiance points which will eventualy increase your rank, both online and off. Rising in rank will gain you new aircrafts and new weapons, which insures you won't just give HAWX a quick playthough.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. will hit the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 March 6th and the PC March 13th.
