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Come Fly The Friendly Skies
Come Fly The Friendly Skies
Posted by Dekko on Feb 20th 2009 12:06
To be honest I'm not a flight sim fan, those anal types who set up their PC for a full Transatlantic flight and they carry it out in its full eight hours, well, they make me both nauseous and kind of curious as to what they do with the rest of their day.
Then there are the combat flight sims where super jet dog fights are on the cards, that sounds better but still, I don't get any great joy from knowing I can fly a hundred different planes in game as, to my Barbarian self, they're all just pointy jets with guns on that'll be soon splatting into the side of a mountain.
I have a friend that is into them, he even talked me in to getting Over G Fighter so he had someone to play it with. He convinced me to get Ace Combat 6 too, knowing that games pedigree I had higher hopes but the thought of an hour 'in the sky' didn't fill my head with images of lots of laughs, more a dread sense of foreboding.
I no longer own either.
So, it is with this mood entrenched behind the barb wire of my mind that I fire up the newest in a long line of games that will elude me; Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
Tommy boy lends his name to all but pro skateboarding games so why not market one that sounds close, eh?
Now for those of you in tune with the Clancy universe (or ‘Clancyverse’) you'll know that Sam Fisher's Splinter Cell spies, Captain Scott Mitchell's Ghost Recon squad and the various Rainbow Six teams all exist in the one stable and as timelines go they all culminate in the events of 'Endwar'.
If you are in to your Clancy games then you'll recognize the H.A.W.X. as a support option from Ghost Recon who make cameo appearances to fly by and provide air cover, taking out tanks and other assorted baddies. Scott Mitchell himself appears in this game, its one big happy Clancyverse.
In H.A.W.X. (which stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) you play David Crinshaw a former US Air Force pilot who now flies for one of the many private military companies which inhabit the Clancyverse but things go sour when the company he works for, well, wait and see.
Ubisoft have used Geo-something or other (?) satellite technology to map the landscapes and mapped well they are, convincing (from a height) but they do suffer that flight sim 'flatness' when you fly to low, something you'll be naturally avoiding anyway unless you want the game to be a bloody pancake simulator.
I can hear Goose’s blood curdling screams now, you weren’t there, man!
Fear not though After Burner fans for the game features an assist system which can be turned on and off to make life easier, also with the option of arcade handling or flight sim handling you have the choice to be or not to be riding Ice Man’s tail anytime.
OK, as I said my mood was not one of ‘looking forward to this game’ in fact it was the opposite BUT once I started playing I actually enjoyed it and felt the control system was well handled and would allow those of us not in to having a full cockpit sized controller access into the game.
Now we have to go and grab the finished game by the short & curlies and play the hell out of it to see if I’m right.
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