Well that was fun.  I just finished Tom Clancy’s HAWX on the Xbox 360.  In as few words as possible I will now tell you how frickin awesome it was and then assign it an arbitrary score.  After all, ItsNotAReview.

I’ve hated EVERY SINGLE flying game that I’ve ever played on the 360.  Hawx broke the that losing streak with a sonic boom.

In HAWX, you and your buddies are amazing pilots, some of the best in the world.  The premise of the game is essentially that, for whatever reason, the Air Force doesn’t need you anymore.  Apparently things are just going too good in the world, and they feel like they could do without you… nothing personal…

FORTUNATELY this company called Artemis has started its own military-for-hire and they would LOVE it if you came to fly fighter jets for them.  Kinda like a temp service for people that like to go really fast and blow things up.

Fortunately for the storyline of the game, you accept their offer.

During your time with HAWX you’ll find yourself at the controls of a ridonkulous array of aircraft, all of which handle and perform differently.  Flying an A-10, for instance, is a lot like flying a refrigerator;  very sluggish.  Flying a Euro fighter, on the other hand, is something akin to being strapped to a rocket that turns on a dime.

One of the most ingenious things that Ubisoft has done with HAWX is the implementation of the ERS, a system that helps you establish the elaborate interception maneuvers needed in a complicated Mach-2 dogfight.  Using a virtual display, you can activate the system to both get behind the guy behind you, or dodge a missle.  You still have to do the work, but you’re provided with sort of a virtual tunnel to follow.  It’s easy at first, but once you get into the game, it gets pretty challenging.

While you have the option of 3 basic views (Cockpit, No Cockpit, and chase) HAWX’s signature gimmick has got to be the OFF view, where your aircraft’s automated systems for avoiding stalls and controlling turns is switched off, giving you a distant third-person view, and letting you pull of some pretty bad-ass maneuvers.  Gone are the days where dogfights descend into a never-ending loopdeloop until someone screws up or gets bored.  SOMEHOW, HAWX makes throwing an F-16 end-over-end seem very believable.  I know it sounds silly, but it just works.

The HAWX story isn’t going to move you on an emotional level, and some of the voice actors seem like they came off some sort of mandatory military stereotype directory, but it works.  It’s interesting, it moves along and best of all there’s no stupid love triangle injected into it.

My only real complaint about HAWX is a complaint we’re starting to see about a LOT of games these days.

It’s just too damned short.

There’s a theory in show business that goes something along the lines of “Better to leave them wishing for more, than wishing you hadn’t,” and HAWX certainly respected that philosophy… perhaps a little too much.  When the game ended and I found myself winding through a narrow canyon for  the epilogue, I was hoping against hope that there was another surprise in store for me.

Perhaps multiplayer will make up for this shortcoming.  I’ve only played a few minutes online in a team deathmatch, and while it was pretty chaotic, I did find it a lot of fun.

The game is beautiful, the controls are as realistic as I think they can be for a console game, and overall, I couldn’t put HAWX down.

Because Tom Clancy’s HAWX looks awesome and innovates on the air combat genre, I have no choice but to fully recommend it for the Xbox 360 (and it’s out on the PS3 and PC too) with an explosive rating of 31 out of 35 SAMS.

See you in the skies folks…  I’ll be the one with missile lock on you.

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