Tom Clancy's name is slandered in this recent release from Ubisoft, making me wonder, are sims on consoles dead?
The graphics are really pretty good. Unfortunately, that's the end of this game's positive.
Hawx 2 takes an arcade game from Hawx 1, and instead of adding innovation, Ubisoft made the game frustratingly difficult at the higher difficulties, not due to less assistance, but rather, ignorant teammate AI, and unrealistic flying.
In Hawx 2, enemies can routinely and at will turn on a near dime by "skidding" in the air, back to back. What in real life would cause a severe stall, is a commonly used tactic to evade missiles in Hawx 2. Unfortunately, the AI planes also seem to be able to accelerate and stop just about as fast, making them literally spin around without speed and then accelerate back at the player. As the levels go higher, enemies do moves like these more and more often.
There are also an unrealistically high level of missiles launched. It's not uncommon to find 2-4 missiles tracking you at the same time, forcing you to spend 10 minutes of game time just attempting to evade missiles, making the missions drag on and on, as they mostly depend on you shooting down your attackers, (which are spinning in circles, and launching missiles at you, forcing you to evade-see the cycle here?)
Combat also takes place unrealistically close and forces you to not only try to spray past your enemies with your cannon as they make razor sharp turns and speed by you, meaning it can take 4-5 passes on an enemy to shoot him down.
As typical, bosses take more damage than any of the other planes and require you to spend more time doing the same things to try to shoot them down. Missiles are nearly useless.
Overall, this game is a major flop. The missiles are highly ineffective, it's far too easy to dodge enemy missiles, so to compensate, AI routinely fire 2-3 missiles at you roughly every 10 seconds to keep you constantly dodging, which makes the gameplay take longer and give the illusion that there is content that is just tedious gameplay.
There are some fun UAV, C-130 missions, but they are not executed as well as in Modern Warfare 2, and overall the controls are sloppy and the planes don't feel very responsive, and wash around in the air, while the enemy makes unrealistically difficult turns.
Hawx 2 is worse than Hawx 1, and is a major letdown and slam to the Tom Clancy name. Don't buy it, it's not even a fun arcade flight sim.