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Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. was essentially an homage to Ace Combat. The game had been brought out in March last year by Ubisoft Romania, a studio that had been steadily producing flight and simulation games since the early Noughties. They had made the WWII era air-combat titles Blazing Angels I and II, and by the time H.A.W.X. shipped in ’09 the game seemed like just another addition to the little pile of aerial combat games you leave in your closet. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t great, but it had a cool acronym for a name.
H.A.W.X. 2 gives the flight game genre another go. The primary shift this time is how it tries to bring things gently from the air and back to earth. H.A.W.X. was the literal translation of air combat: you started missions in-air and you ended missions in-air. The game offered you a story stitched-on to the action about Brazilians attacking the United States in the near future, but it lacked any legitimate engagement with the narrative to make it worthwhile. The sequel tries to give you a bigger slice of what the H.A.W.X. universe is actually comprised of. There’s a world outside the cockpit, and H.A.W.X. 2 tries to bring you its wider, global story.
Talking to the sequel’s Creative Director Edward Douglas he tells us that there were a few things they had wanted to do differently from the original.
“What was missing from the original was that you didn’t feel like a real person in the world. You started out in the air, you ended in the air in third-person point of view. You’re not a person, and you’re not a real person in the real world. I wanted to make you feel like you have real grounding in the world. You know who you are, you know how you fit in and letting you see the story from different points of view lets you engage in the story, you don’t just see that narrow slice of the story. Especially when you get to the Russian campaign in the main game, it’s a very interesting story filled with political twists and espionage compared to the American story in H.A.W.X. 1 which was fairly straight.”
Campaigns ranging from Russia to Britain let you see different sides of a Clancy-style political plot. It’s vague, but it’s there: political instability, nuclear weapons, angry Russkies. In fact it’s the fictional aspects of the sequel that actually make it work. H.A.W.X. 1 was authentic in its combat; an exercise in modern air warfare that let you take down targets just by locking on and pressing a button from a kilometre away. Douglas tells us: “Dog fighting in H.A.W.X. 1 was not that exciting. You had a target a couple of kilometres away, you locked on, you pressed a red button and something exploded really far away. It was a big focus for us to try and get away from that.”
H.A.W.X. 2 draws you closer to the enemies. They will use advanced techniques, forcing themselves to be closer to you. Fighting goes from realistic to cinematic and the mechanical button-pushing of H.A.W.X. gets redesigned as a loose and fast-paced close-combat battle. And it’s that fictional re-telling of air combat that is the major change in the game.
We asked Douglas why the dog fighting genre isn’t more popular with gamers. “There’s two kinds of plane games. I grew up with one kind, Star Fox, Rogue Squadron; those are fun and awesome but not authentic. The other side is simulation where it’s very real, maybe you’re recreating real battles or it’s a WWII game where these planes are much slower. But creating a believable near-future air combat game that is really fun for not just a hardcore gamer that wants something authentic but also a casual player: it’s very challenging.”
It is a hell of a challenge, and that’s exactly where the game begins to feel like it’s slipping. Right alongside the cinematic fights and the geo-political soap opera are tedious reminders that yeah, you’re still flying a plane. H.A.W.X. 2 tries so desperately to be more than a simple air-combat game you end up stuck with little boring nudges from that world outside your cockpit.
You land the plane, you take-off in the plane from the ground, you can spend a good ten seconds driving around a runway until your speed is high enough for take-off. In the presentation demo it was revealed that you can refuel your plane via air-refuel crafts, a process that involves catching up with the plane, dangling underneath it mid-air and fitting your fuel hose into its tank. It’s 30 seconds of non-action followed by what amounts to the refuelling version of threading a needle.
H.A.W.X. 2 is an improvement from the original while still feeling like it has one foot in authentic simulation and the other in air-based action.
H.A.W.X. 2 is due for release on Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Wii in the autumn.
