Tom Clancy's HAWX Hands-On

Brand new impressions of Clancy's airborne epic.

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By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, January 9, 2009

The skyscape we're looking at from the cockpit of our F-14 Tomcat jet is far from a tranquil expanse of blue. It's not just the explosions and machine gun fire, criss-crossing vapour trails and delicate pastel puffs of cloud, nor the plumes from the burning skyscrapers of Rio de Janeiro - we're being bombarded with target reticules and alerts, discreet but pressing objectives to the right of our crosshair, weapon tallies along the bottom, the occasional Advanced Warfighter-esque video feed from an ally pilot in the top left. That Ubisoft Romania has managed to pack in so many HUD elements without making Tom Clancy's HAWX indecipherable is, to put it in sensational terms, miraculous.

We're currently flying with all the game's "assists" toggled on, the camera close behind our Tomcat. In this mode the plane will practically fly itself: anti-stall fail-safes kick in to soften sharper turns, and your on-board computer can, at a button press, guide you to a locked target with a bright green intercept path.

The assists don't make you invulnerable though, as we're about to find out. Warning indicators flash: some cheeky swine has unloaded a couple of heat-seeking missiles into our slipstream. We step up the thrust and roll the left analogue stick, wrenching the nose ninety degrees left and thirty degrees down. The missiles, a little 3D wire model informs us, are still gaining. Another indicator flashes up, telling us to press X to release diversionary flares. We press X to release diversionary flares. One missile falls for the ploy, peeling off to detonate harmlessly in mid-air, but the other one has its eyes on the prize.

It's going to hit us. It hits us. The HUD is briefly overrun with static, but we're still airborne.

We decide to cut the crap. Two brisk tugs on the trigger and a good fifty percent of the HUD ups and vanishes. The camera pulls back from traditional tail-fin view to a cinematic angle a hundred metres behind and slightly to one side of our plane. Our persistent enemy is now visible, a darker, blunter shape on the edge of the screen.

This is assistance-off mode, and it's more than just a higher difficulty setting. We're shorn of many of our visual and tactical aids in this mode - the computer won't lead us to our target, though we can still lock on, detect incoming missiles and view our objectives - and it's more or less impossible to score hits with unguided weapons. But we're also able to see the planes swooping around us in relation to ourselves, and thus better elude or pursue them. Most importantly, we're free of those mollycoddling fail-safes, able to pull off dangerous manoeuvres, daredevil tricks with which to get the drop on bothersome opposition. Daredevil tricks like this one.

We hit the brakes and pull the nose up simultaneously, dragging the craft back into a tight, near-suicidal loop-the-loop. Warnings squeal and the controller shakes as air thunders angrily against our fuselage. Caught off-guard, the other pilot zips beneath us. If we've calculated it just right, we should be able to hammer on the thrust at this point, jerking the Tomcat back to a safe velocity, squarely behind our erstwhile attacker.

We haven't. The plane plummets, engines coughing like mutinous old men. A few seconds of breathtaking vertigo pass before they cut back in, sweeping us out of our descent a good thousand metres nearer to those skyscrapers. But we're still on the bastard's tail, somehow. We get a lock. We let rip. The opposing squadrons are one plane lighter.

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