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" Also available on: PlayStation 3 Genre: Combat Flight Simulation Developer: Ubisoft Romania Publisher: Ubisoft Release date: March 6, 2009 Are you aware of how much the Tom Clancy brand is worth? Last year publisher Ubisoft bought lifetime rights for a cool \u00A347 million. The name is a gold mine, and has been plastered on a whole series of tactical shooters, voice controlled real-time strategy games and cereal boxes (Clancy-O&amp;#039;s, anyone?). This time we take to the skies with H.A.W.X., or High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron, a futuristic combat flight simulation set in the Tom Clancy universe, taking our fingers off the triggers and onto a flying stick - all in a bid to help pay off some of that \u00A347 million bill hanging over Ubisoft&amp;#039;s heads. Fans of smothering themselves in an anorak-level of military knowledge won&amp;#039;t be disappointed in the lashings of on-screen stats and customisation here. Tying directly into the universe of EndWar, you&amp;#039;ll be helping out Ghost Recon teams around the world as you leave the H.A.W.X. unit to join a Private Military Corporation (PMC) for a better pension, but everything is not quite as straightforward as it seems. Features like customising your plane with your hand picked arsenal, assigning teammates commands through the D-Pad, and the fact that every destroyed tank, artillery or bomber gives you experience points to unlock goodies hammers home that the Tom Clancy treatment wasn&amp;#039;t spared here. But unlike the previous deep, tactical and strategic titles in the franchise, this is a deceptively straightforward affair. Behind all the usual gloss of military terms and branded cruise missiles, actually taking out enemies is as simple as looking at them, waiting for the red homing box to envelop them, and firing a few heat-seeking missiles their way. Partly down to the rather efficient and easy-to-use control scheme, taking out most flying enemies and ground targets is a breeze. A few obvious annoyances in the first missions aside, such as midair dog fights acting out like a comedy sketch of chasing someone round a pole and playing catch up until you finally lock on, it&amp;#039;s far from a challenging flight simulator, and lacks speed or visceral action to boot. It does, however, have an ace up its sleeve. After a rather drawn-out campaign introduction, you are finally introduced to the &amp;quot;Assistance OFF&amp;quot; mode. With a double tap of a trigger the viewpoint is thrown out from a kilometre away, with your plane hovering from a far off isometric viewpoint. With the computer systems disabled and the heads-up display removed, there&amp;#039;s nothing between you and the enemy but clear blue sky, and the playing experience suddenly becomes awesome; from here you gain full control of your plane and can see miles around you all at once. Dog fights become tense and exciting battles instead of drawn out affairs as you spin the plane on a dime and blast out missiles as they come into view, all while trying to maintain enough speed to avoid stalling. It transforms the game from shooting fish in a barrel to a stratospheric game of Micro Machines. Not only does it make the gameplay better in these dramatic scrambles for dominance and survival, but it gives you that gut-wrenching feeling you&amp;#039;re travelling at Mach 3. While it&amp;#039;s a bold and interesting way of shaking up a rather humdrum genre, it&amp;#039;s not one that entirely pays off. As it uses the same controls as before, it intrinsically makes it difficult and rather disorientating to play - you don&amp;#039;t know which way up you are most of the time, let alone able to target enemies effectively. This would make it unplayable for the majority of players, despite its uses in dodging missiles and making dog fights shorter (and ten times more exciting), but even with these advantages you&amp;#039;ll be using the standard views anyway, as the objectives are dependant on the heads-up display for maps and targeting. While the brief escapades of sitting in the clouds are dazzling, the rest of the gameplay is reasonably turbulence free. Gorgeous visuals lubricate the otherwise straightforward missions, especially as cities use real satellite data (fighting a dozen fighters above Rio de Janeiro is a sight to behold) as do some interesting game mechanics to spice things up a bit. A 3D flight path made of rings to fly through helps you intercept oncoming enemies in a timely fashion, and assists with daring raids on terrorist bases stuck deep in mountains with the tap of the X button. Despite the majority of missions consisting of derivative base protecting, dog fights and escorts, they make good use of the expensive toys in your arsenal, from carpet bombs to multi-targeting missiles. While these features have their uses, they are largely supplementary to the lock-on and shoot gameplay. There are various niggles that get in the way, such as stupid AI teammates that require babysitting, and lock-on not automatically switching between enemies in a timely fashion. The online multiplayer and co-operative play that is fused to the campaign make this game a much more well-rounded product if you have friends to share it with, although online play only illustrates the simplicity of the game more than anywhere else, as there is no real skill to skirting around each other, just a level of patience and luck to who locks on who, even with the &amp;quot;Assistance OFF&amp;quot; settings. The fact that H.A.W.X. is so well integrated into the Tom Clancy brand makes it more attractive than the majority of other combat flight simulators on the market, and yet this is probably the game&amp;#039;s biggest downfall. Its dependence on a brand whose rhetoric of strategy and tactics is entirely lost when its mission objectives and core gameplay is so basic and straightforward. H.A.W.X. isn&amp;#039;t boring by any means, nor is it entirely bland; it&amp;#039;s a thoroughly enjoyable game even at its most undemanding sections, but suffers from rough ideas despite their recognised attempts at livening things up. While it looks to the sky, H.A.W.X. doesn&amp;#039;t take the brand to any new heights. Let&amp;#039;s hope that cheque hasn&amp;#039;t been cashed in yet.  &amp;gt; What do you think of the game? Share your views "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/review/a149281/tom-clancys-hawx-360/>