I'm just going to make it easier to read for people who may have difficulties reading it, nothing against you Reaper :)
During a multiplayer press event last week, I got some hands-on time with developer Ubisoft Romania's upcoming flight combat simulator HAWX. They're gearing up for an attempt at air supremacy against the entrenched standard for aerial action, Ace Combat, with a release date set for early March and a public demo dropping this February. Click on the above pic to see new screens of the game.
Set between popular shooter GRAW and last year's voice-command-centric EndWar, HAWX isn't as arcadey as Ace Combat, but it isn't trying to be a complex Flight Simulator either. The controls are a little intimidating at first, but there are several options to help ease beginners into the cockpit while still letting veterans control the minutiae of flying, a detail touched on in our preview from the Tokyo Game Show. Unfortunately, those flight assists didn't help me and my team of other journalists complete all our co-op objectives together. While we were able to work together and take out our flying AI controlled opponents pretty easily, we collectively failed a mission twice in a row that involved keeping the President's jet Air Force One safe. Whether that's due too an overly difficult task and relative unfamiliarity with the game mechanics, or a hard to read map and unclear objectives is debatable. But HAWX still has a couple months to work out its kinks.
The game is doing some things right, though: Borrowing a welcome feature from Saints Row and Gears of War, HAWX includes the ability to jump in and join a friend in the middle of a campaign. And the game adjusts the difficulty on the fly -- increasing the number of opponents as your number of wingmates grows. The maps look great too, with carefully constructed replicas of Chicago and the Capitol. You probably won't be paying much attention to the ground, but it's still impressive to fly over the Washington Monument as you swoop in to take out enemy tanks. And for those who have already invested in an expensive flight stick, the game promises compatibility with almost every major peripheral on the market.
Ubisoft's taken advantage of the Tom Clancy license to create an expanded universe across disparate titles that's impressive in its scope, if not yet in its execution. Hopefully, this next chapter in the Ghost Recon universe is better received than the average strategy title EndWar.