Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. (PC)

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It looks nice, doesn't it? Oh yes, it most certainly does.

You know, we're still not sure about the title. It's supposed to stand for "High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron", but surely that should be spelled HAWXS? And besides, the way they're using the X is a cheat! Then again, if you had to use the E then the game would be called HAWEs... which sounds uncomfortably close to "Whores".

If we had our way, all games would have straightforward titles - and this one would be called Tom Clancy's Shooty Planes. Still, we rather doubt that Ubisoft appreciates our suggestion on this matter, and as things stand HAWX will do fine. As Shakespeare once wrote, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and this is looking to be one of the prettier flowers of 2009.

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Indeed, if you've seen any clips from the game you'll know all about the game's soup-a-slick graphics, with beefy plane models and even-better landscapes crafted using GeoEye - what Ubisoft is proudly referring to as "Google Earth on steroids". HAWX is certainly a nice piece of eye candy - and one with a pretty silky frame rate to boot - but it's been quite a while since our last hands-on with the game, back at Ubidays in early 2008. So when we were invited over to the Royal Air Force Museum, just before Christmas, we were more than ready for a second helping of Top Gun-style antics.

It's disappointingly hard to think of funny stuff to say about planes. Damn.

On this occasion our preview time was spent trying out a quartet of missions in four-player co-op mode, a selection that offered a spread of objectives from straight-up dogfighting to defending Air Force One. All of these stages are present in the single-player campaign - and strictly speaking that's really what we were all playing. Each co-op user receives the story messages that would normally be dished out, so everyone believes that they are the one taking on the role of hero-pilot David Crinshaw. Having said this, there are certain differences in the way the missions play out when you're flying alongside chums. Before we set off, a Ubisoft dev assured us that this is more than a matter of simply chucking in more enemies, and that the game forces a co-op party to work as a tactical unit to accomplish their objectives. How this change is enforced remains something of a mystery, but for whatever reason we certainly did find that the harder levels required a fair bit of mutual support.

Our first group outing proved to be a fairly gentle introduction, working for a Private Military Contractor named Artemis. These guys turn out to be bad news later on in the game's plotline (which fits neatly between GRAW 2 and EndWar), but for the time being they're the ones signing your paycheck. Artemis want you to defend an industrial complex in the Middle East that's being targeted by an invading army from an unnamed neighbouring state - a job gives you ample opportunity to fly about the desert while raining down death from above. What with this being the first mission, the level of challenge is fairly low. A large bulk of the enemy targets are tanks and other ground troops, slowly heading towards the refinery. Your aim is stop the bad guys before they come into firing range of the protected buildings - a boundary that is represented by a dome-like grid that appears in the gameworld, represented in a futuristic style that will be familiar to players of EndWar and other Tom Clancy titles.

Aside from the fact that there were quite a lot of them, the tanks proved to be a minor threat to our deadly Eurofighter Typhoon. The enemy aircraft also seemed fairly tame in this opening stage, with the result that the four of us playing decided to get quite competitive. Ubisoft have smartly included an on-screen score chart for co-op missions, so you'll be able to see exactly how many kills your fellow pilots have notched up, along with what aircraft they're using. HAWX will ultimately offer a choice of 60 contemporary and prototype planes along with multiple skins and weapon load-outs to cater for different objectives, so there'll be plenty of choice on offer. We're no aviation experts, but we can certainly report a surprising difference in the way each model flies. Our mainstay throughout the missions was the all-round excellent Typhoon, but we also had time for the killer firepower of the SU-37 Terminator and the fun-but-slightly-hard-to-control F22 Raptor.

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