The Ace Combat series has dominated the aerial combat genre for more than 10 years. Would-be contenders have come and gone, all shot down with ruthless efficiency by Namco’s seemingly unbeatable ace. So you’ll forgive Project Aces if they aren’t particularly worried about one more upstart threatening to burst onto the scene and take the sky away from their top gun. They should be worried. Project Aces’ baby has never had to deal with competition on par with what’s coming: a well-financed, sharply designed rival that draws just enough from the master to stay on its tail, and packs a powerful combination of brand power and authenticity under its wings. Tom Clancy’s HAWX has Ace Combat in its sights and is lining up the lock-on. It’s not doing anything particularly new or revolutionary, but it’s doing many familiar things very, very well.
Ubisoft is fully leveraging the Tom Clancy name and the level of authenticity associated with the brand. You won’t find any fictionalized countries or melodramatic Japanese storylines here, only real-world cities and combat zones from the Middle-East to South America. The developers are using the latest military-grade satellite technology available to render the environments accurately down to the finest detail. If you were impressed the first time you used Google Earth to look at your house, just wait till you’re shooting over high-resolution, topographically accurate terrain at 500 mph, sweeping through mountain passes and slaloming through skyscrapers. Obviously, not every building in the city areas are full 3D, and once you drop close enough to the ground the illusion is lost, but the breaking point is a lot closer to the ground than it was in Ace Combat 6, for example. Besides, it’s not like you’ll be analyzing the textures 2 feet off the ground in the middle of a dogfight.
Obviously the military hardware has been given the same level of attention, and the game includes 50 licensed planes that have been meticulously recreated inch by inch. To put that in perspective, the Ace Combat games typically feature less than 20. We didn’t go through plane-by-plane, but every fighter we saw was beautifully detailed, and watching them fly, with subtle reflections bouncing on their curved metal bodies, vapor trails running off their twisting wings and heat distortion ripping out the engines, was a sight to behold. This really is a gorgeous game. HAWX really feels grounded in the Tom Clancy universe thanks to overt ties to some of Ubisoft’s other properties, particularly Ghost Recon. The HUD is full of the same brightly colored arrows and indicator diamonds we saw in those games, and several missions will have the player providing air support for Scott Mitchell and company. It’s a nice touch that ties everything together.
Gameplay-wise, Ubisoft is smart enough to realize the ball-busting simulations are out of vogue these days. People go to school to learn to fly for a reason; it’s pretty freaking complicated, and most gamers just want to cut straight to the fun stuff. So despite all the authentic locales and machinery, the actual gameplay is about as arcadey as Ace Combat. The 50 planes mentioned earlier? They all handle differently, but not necessarily exactly like their real-world counterparts for obvious balancing reasons. If they did, who the hell would bother to fly anything but an F22? Speaking of which, the F22 can’t target enemies beyond the curvature of the horizon-line like it can in the real world either. That would make for some short multiplayer matches, wouldn’t it? All the planes carry more ammo than most small countries have on hand, and enemies typically take two missiles to go down. Not particularly realistic, but it makes for longer, more interesting dog fights.
The dog fighting in HAWX feels a lot more intense and cinematic than the immediate competition thanks to the implementation of a few clever mechanics. The most important new feature is pilot assistance, which the player can turn on and off at will to reap unique benefits. When assistance is on, the game plays from the familiar behind-the-plane vantage point and players have access to the ERS system, a virtual tunnel that appears on the HUD to guide players out of missile lock or to intercept enemies. Turning assistance off brings the camera way out and eliminates the HUD almost entirely, giving players a much wider view of the action around them and enabling them to pull off more advanced, risky techniques. If you’re having trouble following, think of the system in terms of a more familiar genre – the racing sim. Flying with assistance on is akin to driving with traction control, ABS and all those other neat systems in play. It’s safer, and you’ll get where you need to go, but you won’t really be able to push the car to the limit. Flying with assistance off is the equivalent of turning those driving aids off – it’s not as easy to do, but advanced pilots can get more out of their craft.
The system works well since it’s malleable enough to give new users all the help they need, but let’s advanced players only use what the want. The entire game can be played online or offline with assistance on, players can opt to ignore the prompts for the ERS and use the familiar vantage-point without the training wheels, they can swap back and forth depending on the situation, or they can play the whole game with assistance off for an incredibly pure, cinematic experience. Every option has its pros and cons, so every player will have to figure out which way suits their play-style. We enjoyed switching back and forth on the fly, turning assistance on to survey the battle, choose targets and make the approach, and turning assistance off right as we got into striking range for a wider vantage point of our target and any friends they had coming around to help them. It also ensured we would be able to pull off a quick high-G turn and get back into firing position in case they were able to deke us out and force us to overshoot them.
Battling the enemy’s top aces, who arrived on the scene right after we took care of the key targets, almost required turning assists off since our survival hinged on the ability to pull off high-G turns, loops and twists to get in behind for the lock-on. The assist-off camera angle is definitely going to take some getting used to though, and we wish it had less of a tendency to pan around during or after evasive maneuvers. Determining which way is up and which direction to push the stick to go up are extra mental steps we don’t want to be taking while we’re in the middle of a dog-fight with multiple enemy planes thanks. Some found it easier to free fly around using the assist-off camera and switch the assists on upon engagement to make use of the ERS system, but we just didn’t feel confident enough with the assist-off camera for that. We felt a disconnect between where we wanted the plane to go, where we felt our input should make it go, and where it actually did go, thanks in large part to the shifting camera angle. We’re sure it will become second nature in enough time, but we felt more comfortable reserving the advanced mode for quick bursts of tight, high-G maneuvers.
