Tom Clancy's HAWX 2: First Look

Fans of the original Tom Clancy's HAWX will be happy to know that much of what made the original game entertaining--fast-paced aerial combat--is still on display in HAWX 2, but the development team has made a number of improvements to deliver a more fleshed-out flying experience. We get the first taste of this in the first mission in the game, where we learn that the world is once again in the throes of political instability and nuclear weapons are missing from a Russian facility. The mission starts with a fully controllable F-16 takeoff sequence at a remote air base in the desert, and while you're heading toward the runway, you'll see little details that show how the base isn't just a static object. It's fully functional and mobilizing for the task at hand.

Once you're in the sky, you fly over your first destination--in this case, a small village--to make sure that it's secure. Once that's done, you move on to a convoy and inspect it for similar reasons. This is all pretty simple, of course, but these quick jaunts are seemingly there to help you get accustomed to the way the game controls. However, things start to pick up when you come across another unidentified convoy and discover that it's hostile when an RPG zips out of one of the trucks, taking down one of the helicopters that also came to inspect the convoy. At this point, we learn about the two different attack methods. Obviously, you have access to guns on the aircraft, but there are also precision bombs and rockets. Precision bombs are excellent for when you need to hit specific ground targets while minimizing the collateral damage, whereas rockets are a good all-purpose weapon when the situation calls for mass destruction. As the mission continues, we learn that the air base is under attack from a remote missile strike, and just as you're about to make your way back, one of these missiles clips your jet and sends it careening toward the ground.

We then fast-forward to later in the game--this time a nighttime seek-and-destroy mission where you take off (once again, a manual takeoff) from a carrier in an F-35 stealth fighter and fly over a region of an African country. Since this is a nighttime mission, you can switch to night vision to get a better look at the targets, which happen to be some tankers floating off the coast. The trick here is that some of these tankers are friendly while some of them are hostile, but you'll know which are OK to fire on once you get them in your sites and assess the situation. When you decide that one of the tankers is an enemy, you can fire a precision bomb and take it out with ease, but once you take out the first target, antiair fire starts streaming from the coastline. There's nice subtle detail here--since the country you're flying over doesn't necessarily have the best defenses, particularly against stealth aircraft, the antiair fire tends to spring up in random directions. So while this antiair fire won't necessarily fly directly at you, it's still wise to pay close attention so that you don't inadvertently turn into one of the streams.

We didn't get to see the ending for this particular mission (though we're told that HAWX 2 will also feature manual landing on aircraft carriers), but we did get to see some dogfighting action. The development team behind HAWX 2 stated that it wants dogfighting to be a more visceral experience. The result of this seems to be that jets will be flying pretty close to each other when they're engaged--we saw plenty of jets using their flares to thwart missile attacks and perform a variety of maneuvers to evade enemy fire. Additionally, when other jets are controlled by the AI, they will often turn to face you in a game of chicken as a means of replicating human behavior in multiplayer situations. On top of that, the picture-in-picture feature will generally make it easier to track enemy jets, because you'll get a closer look at their maneuvers and get a better idea of how to engage them.

It's worth mentioning that in full-on multiplayer, you can select from a variety of aircraft, all of which have different attributes. Also of note: You can play the entire single-player campaign cooperatively over the various online services for each platform (or through system link on the Xbox 360). We'll have more on HAWX 2, including more info on the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles that let you spy on enemy targets) missions, before its release this fall on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.