HAWX 2 Preview

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We all enjoy flying jet planes in virtual airspace, doing loop the loops and constantly shouting the ongoing phrase “Barrel Roll” in the back of our minds to get out of a tight spot in the average dogfight. Tom Clancy is the man when it comes to taking to the sky, he can take on any form of tactical scenario and I’ve even heard a rumour that he’s always cooking onboard his plane, what a guy!

We got the chance to play an early preview build of HAWX 2 on the Xbox360. We also got a chance to speak to Edward Douglas who is the Creative Director on the game and asked him if he was getting in a plane with us, fool.

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Released: 03 September 2010
Category: Flight Simulation
Age: 18 Years and above
Publisher: Ubisoft

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Singleplayer/Co-op

The singleplayer campaign can be taken online for a 4 player co-op experience. We got into the story missions with 3 other bidding journos and we all experienced the same together. Taking off, refuelling and even the dreaded landing is all done in tandem to each other. No one misses out on what they would be getting up to if they were playing the story on their own, each play their own role in the HAWX team. We really want to play through the game in co-op for review, so we can all wear headsets and feel like real fighter pilots!

We got the chance to play through a good chunk of single player missions throughout the day, all totally different from the last to show off the new game features. Lets look at 3 of them.

The Art of Flying

When you think of dog fights and flying incredibly expensive aircraft the first thing that comes to mind is Top Gun. For those readers who still believe it to be the most homosexual movie out there, have you ever watched Brake your back mountain? It’s a gym instructor’s workout movie. Top Gun however has always been in our hearts, something about Tom Cruise playing someone called ‘Maverick’ just made everything feel, magical (I may even name my child Goose – not that I want him to die or anything). The camera angles of the film gave you the viewer ‘awesome chills’ about air combat. The chance to shout the word bogey, legally, has to this day been the most excitement to any man on earth. HAWX 2 aims to bring the cool back into fighter jets and make the local air museum even cooler, better air-con.

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Contact

The game’s opening gambit tutorial, you set off from the runway to cruise the skies, change your camera angle to see what you most prefer and then get set for some combat. Our first annoyance came at the hurdle of changing camera angle. It seems that you will actually have to pause the game and go into your game options to change the camera settings. We hope that this was just a problem in the preview build because otherwise Its just quite stupid, can’t we click in the right stick like last time? Well we can only hope.

Your initial enemy contact is thanks to some insurgents doing some crafty convoy work. You fly over a convoy which doesn’t like you hovering above them, they open fire and then the rest is history. You get to use the brand new ‘precision bombing’ feature and lay waste to the critters. This introduces you to a AC130 like camera (like the kill streak in Modern Warfare 2). Simply click the target and then say night night. You see the bombing run complete its flight and get a rather cinematic view of bombs on the battlefield.

Oil Rig

A mission allowing the fighters to open fire, fire at will some say. You approach an Oil Rig at dusk which has been taken over by insurgents, you’ve got to take it back.

The only mechanic being shown off in the mission was the landing process, which was a rather simple method of just lining your fighter up and then slowing down and aiming right at the strip. Not quite what we had in mind, we would of preferred the motion to be a bit more death defying and have you sweating from head to toe. From what we’ve heard, it is quite a hard task to get right and very easy to get wrong, flying you straight into the sea.

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Interception Course

This mission starts in the skies with you cruising towards a handful of other shipment planes and jets flying through the local airspace. You ask for them to reply with details on them being friendly aircraft otherwise your guys will open fire, you see where this is going once more...

This gave us the chance to get our Top Gun style communication going on with the word “Bogey 12 o’clock” and constantly mentioning the time, didn’t quite get that bit. Using the ‘OFF’ mode to have the jet drop back into a free-cam  view allowing you to have more view of the amazing looking battlefield as well as keep control of advance manoeuvres in your fighter jet. The ‘OFF’ mode remains unchanged from the original HAWX game.

After dealing with the foes you are then asked to go and refuel your fighter, which wasn’t quite what we thought it would be like. It was quite an awkward moment. A visual cue gets you to line up with the refuelling plane and you slowly want to beckon your refuelling ‘tube’ into the highlighted area. It being a massive hovering plane you don’t want to be crashing into it, you could die. So you slowly but surely fly in and begin threading the eye of a needle to get into position, It’s all very fiddly. When you get closer the camera begins lunging inwards and gives you the feeling that you’re about to crash into the refuelling plane, when you’re actually quite far away from doing that. An incredibly awkward game mechanic which we were definitely happy to see that HAWX 2 had thought about putting refuelling into the game but from what we attempted to do, it was all very uncomfortable. Like getting caught with your trousers down.

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Overal Then...

We love planes, we love the sound that they make and sticking our head into their engines just for a thrill, It's daring. We were also massive fans of the original HAWX game and were still aware of the bugs and problems that held up the game's overal result, however we can proudly say that the 2nd installment will blow you sky high. After leaving the preview event we were left wanting more, lots more.

HAWX 2 has a September 3rd release date