I rented Tom Clancy’s HAWX on Thursday afternoon and finished the last mission Sunday afternoon.  All 20 missions took me around 9 hours and that was with replaying a couple of the missions over and over.  I’m really not that great at flying games but I liked that HAWX has options to help assist inexperienced players.  The Enhanced Reality System (ERS) literally puts triangles on the screen that if you fly through will put you in the correct position to win. Whether that is a dog fight, a bombing run, or dodging an incoming surface to air missile.  You do not have to use the ERS system but it is there if you need it which I found useful for the first few missions of the game.  After using it for a while I started to figure out how to do it on my own, but without the ERS I would probably not have made it all the way through the game.  After the 5th or 6th mission I pretty much never used the ERS because by then it had trained me how the game wanted me to fly.

The missions had a lot of variety in them. There were some normal shoot down everyone in the sky levels, but also some escort, protection, and clear a path missions.  A couple of the protection and escort missions were really annoying. One in particular, set in a Japanese harbor, was a real pain. However, these were offset by some really fun missions. Plus they do a good job of giving you checkpoints so you do not have to replay an entire mission for one mistake.  The few of the missions where you had to clear a path for ground troops to approach a final target were really fun.  I also really appreciated the final Epilogue mission because you did not have to shoot much but instead had to fly down a narrow canyon below radar level.  It felt like all the movies where you see a pilot trying to sneak a covert op group to some enemy beach without being spotted.

The graphics in HAWX are gorgeous. The team from UbiSoft used actual satellite imaging so as you are flying overhead and look down it looks extremely realistic.  I also really liked the story’s plot. It starts off a few years in the future and then after 5 missions it jumps to about 12 years in the future.  You start off as a pilot in the military and then you move to the private sector.  After moving to the private sector your employer starts to step over the line and you have to help stop them.  The plot did not seem very believable, but I did not mind that because they did a nice job of tying the story in with the mission types.

I do have a couple complaints about the game.  Maybe it was just me because I’m not very good at flying games, but all of the planes felt the same.  The stats showed some of them have better handling, go faster, or have more armor, but when I was actually flying them I could not really tell any difference.  Each plane looks unique but if they did not have different weapon load outs I would not have ever known it was anything more than a different skin.  My other issue was that I never really got a good handle for the controls. I played most of the game with “assists” turned on to keep from stalling the plane and for the over the top camera view.  This worked well for me except that if I wanted to stay level, turn slight to the right while speeding up I had to be able to hold both the Right Bumper and Right Trigger at the same time. This seems like it would not be that common but when you’re lining up a bombing run it seemed to happen a lot. The same type control layout issue occurs when you want to stay level while turning to the left a little and slowing down.  Then you have to hit both the left bumper and left trigger.  I’m not sure how this could really be addressed with using the Xbox 360 controller but since I’m not looking to buy a flight stick I wish they could have found a better option.

Most of the campaign achievements are for completing the 20 missions in the game.  The only issue I had was that one of the achievements just did not unlock when I completed a mission.  I looked around the game’s forums and it seems that this is a pretty common issue.  Sounds like I was lucky it only happened for one mission.  The only other two campaign based achievements were for flying for an hour with assists turned off and for flying an hour at speeds over Mach 2.  I got both of these by going onto Free Play and rubber banding my controller to keep my plane going in a circle.  I think more experienced players probably would get both of those just going through the campaign, but since I did not I decided to  be cheap and get them without any effort.

Having completed the full campaign in 4 days, and since I’m not interested in playing any multiplayer, I’m glad I rented it.  It was fun to play even with a few annoyances.  If you’re not looking to play a lot of multiplayer matches I would recommend renting though because it is not a very lengthy campaign.