You’re on a routine training mission. Suddenly, you get word of a suspicious passenger aircraft flying off course, and are sent to investigate. Surprise! It explodes, stalling your engines and throwing your plane into a spin, but you manage to wrest the aircraft back under control before smashing into the smouldering wreckage of the suicidal airliner. Sound clichéd? It is, and that’s just the start of the game. Worst of all, at no point later in the game can an explosion from another aircraft even affect your own, to the point where you can literally fly through the wreckage of a falling opponent’s fighter. So much for consistency.
Through the air
As expected, much of the game is spent piloting millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to its almost inevitable destruction. Ideally, of course, you want to take as many of the bad guys with you as you can, and the game makes it somewhat easy with the efficiency of your weapons, not to mention the fact that enemy pilots are often no better than your friendly wingmen; they only become somewhat competent when in large groups and in the final two or three missions.
The campaign missions are somewhat samey, often asking you to repeat objectives over and over until everything’s dead, and, as such, you’ll find it difficult to stomach the game for long periods at a time. In between the repetitive main missions and generic Tom Clancy storyline– huge conspiracies, terrorists, Russians, nuclear weapons – the game twists it up a little bit with a handful of stealthier missions where you pilot unmanned reconnaissance craft, and even features a mission where you’re a gunner on an AC-130 gunship, defending a squad as it moves through a city on the ground. Sound familiar? Yeah, this one’s not as good as that one. In fact, despite bearing no other resemblance to them (in quality or gameplay) at all, the game’s presentation and storyline is strongly reminiscent to the two Modern Warfare games, to a point where it almost feels like someone should be getting sued.
With the greatest of ease
…well, not really. Those awesome bits of million-dollar equipment are often spent being crashed into various things – including, but not limited to, laser beams from the sky; the aircraft carrier you’re meant to land on; a mountain; ocean waves; the ground; completely clear, open sky in that one mission with a height restriction; or even the runway you’re taking off from – all due to the fact that the controls try so hard to be “arcade” that they just never feel quite right, and take hours of play to even begin to grasp.
The Assistance OFF mode – it’s still an acronym, for some reason – makes a return, to make all your nauseating spins and twists a little bit easier to keep track of. Once again, it pulls out the camera into a third-person ‘dogfight mode’, allowing you to perform manoeuvres that you couldn’t in standard mode; however, it exacerbates the difficulty of controlling your aircraft and the already finicky task of aiming weapons such as the nose-mounted cannons. It’s an ironic point, because some of the most fun things about the game involve using the movement capabilities granted to you by Assistance OFF, yet doing so is almost entirely impractical.
In simplest terms, H.A.W.X 2 feels like an utterly soulless game. It’s so thoroughly average in all regards that it’s actually hard to think of one particular notable moment. It’s a game without a heart, made with little love, and while it has its moments, it’s a really difficult game to recommend for any reason. Basically, those Russian guys know how to do this better in nearly all aspects; stick to IL-2 Sturmovik.
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