H.A.W.X., Gameloft’s new flight combat game based on Tom Clancy’s novels, has landed in the app store. Combining gorgeous imagery with exciting missions, this game aims to pin your ears back with its pulse-pounding, adrenaline-soaked gameplay.
You are David Crenshaw, a top pilot with the High Altitude Warfare eXperimental (H.A.W.X) unit. Your position requires you take on 13 action-heavy campaigns ranging from protecting a refinery from hostiles to dogfighting and precision flying. You accomplish this by flying any of 26 licensed aircraft, including popular models like the F-14A Tomcat or our personal fav, the F-117 Nighthawk. You’ll travel the world, protecting interests at home (Nevada, Chicago, Washington, DC) and abroad (Mexico, Brazil, the Middle East). Only a handful of jets are unlocked from the start, with many opening up based on experience point earned for successes in combat missions. So far, missions seem to take about 15-20 minutes to complete, provided you do so on the first try. We estimate that gameplay is somewhere in the 8 hour range.
Each mission allows you to choose your rig based on attributes such as speed, handling, and armor. You also choose your weapons package, which is limited early on but should become more customizable as you unlock other packages. After this, you’ll receive a detailed voiceover description while the mission loads. There is some banter between you and your commander, and then you’re live. The jets handle pretty well, though they don’t feel as quick as the aircraft in F.A.S.T. The terrain is based on actual satellite imagery, adding a great sense of realism to the game, much in the same way that Tom Clancy’s novels feel like accounts of actual events. The audio is crisp and clear, and the dialogue has a very movie-like quality about it. While few video game scripts are worth much of anything, this one’s not half-bad. Radio chatter continues to inform you of new threats and the status of your mission. The in-game music is pretty cool, but you can play your own, as well. Completing portions of the mission result in passing checkpoints, from which you can start if you crash your jet (which is possible) or fail your mission.
The control scheme makes or breaks a game like this. No matter how great it looks or how terrific the audio is, the inability to control the craft or hit the proper buttons renders a game useless. The controls in H.A.W.X. do not suffer this malady. You have two options for controls: accelerometer or virtual stick. While we felt that both got the job done, we preferred the tilt controls. The iDevice just feels like it was made for this type of game and this type of control scheme. Before each mission begins, you calibrate the device by holding it in your neutral position and tapping the screen. Tilt the device left or right to roll, and up or down to pitch. There are tiny touch buttons for the flaps, which nudge you left or right to more accurately align your jet with your target. A throttle slider is on the right side of the screen and weapons buttons reside in the lower right corner. Take out enemies by getting close enough and locking on, firing your guided missiles to blow them out of the sky or off the ground. You also have machine guns available, if necessary. Swipe the current weapon button to switch to an alternate missile type. The left side of the screen houses the change view button, allowing for a cockpit view or a follow target view. There is also a change target button and pause button surrounding it. Everything felt adequately spaced out and the HUD wasn’t overly crowded.
The very first mission is a tutorial, walking you through speeding up and slowing down, turning, climbing, precision flying, locking on, firing flares, and more. This was well done and really gave a good sense of how the rest of the game would play. We did have a few concerns with the game. Our biggest complaint was the lack of an altitude indicator. We tend to fly low, often skimming ground, but we have no idea how close we are to crashing. There is a low altitude indicator bar that appears on screen when you drop below a certain threshold, but that’s the most warning you get before hitting the deck. You also have a limited number of flares to fire off if someone takes a shot at you, but it’s hard to tell how close the missile is or whether you can avoid it without wasting a flare. It would be cool if there was some feedback to help you make that snap decision. Another issue was that the enemy AI seemed a bit easy, at least in the early going. We were blowing up jets with little resistance, which is fun but it could get boring if the difficulty doesn’t ramp up before too long.
A four-player multiplayer mode is available, but only over local wi-fi or Bluetooth, so we were unable to try it out. It would be awesome to see this expanded to global wi-fi, as this is becoming a more and more popular option, often being added a few months after the initial release. We’ll keep hope alive. Replay value is pretty high, as you can try the missions with a lot of different aircrafts, which should offer a different experience. H.A.W.X.’s biggest competitor is F.A.S.T., which just came out with a pretty hefty update. F.A.S.T.’s online multiplayer is a big bonus (as well as the fact that it’s now free), but the engaging storyline of H.A.W.X. offers a much different experience, not to mention the various campaigns and ground targets. H.A.W.X. carries the typical premium Gameloft price tag of $6.99 while locking on to its 4-Dimple targeted score.
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating:
