Hawx

Rating: T

Score: 7.0/10

Off the top of your head, name all the good Flight Simulation games you know. There’s few, to say the least. This one was made for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 before the PC version. This is odd because PC is usually the only platform to get Flight Simulation games, let alone the PC version getting one after it is released on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (It’s only off by 11 days, but still). There’s also a Nintendo Wii version coming sometime, but we don’t know when.

The gameplay is what you would expect, more or less. You get in a jet, you flight around and launch missiles at other tanks and jets to win. Move on to do the same thing in a different place. It’s not boring, but it’s not very deep. There is levelling up, giving some RPG elements which add depth, but levelling up does little.

The environments look great, until you get close to the ground (which is inevitable since all enemy tanks, a common enemy, are down there).The ground is heavily pixelated, something a game of its age should never be. You could say it’s nitpicking, but you could also say there’s no reason why it should be like that when all other textures look great.

The controls are good. It’s hard to control the jets, but I imagine real jets are pretty hard to control too. Each jet controls the same, which is a problem. You get a bunch of different jets, but they all handle the same way. All are hard to control and not very fast (for jets, anyway).

The AI is futile; don’t rely on that for any support. They fly around you, and little else. It’s once in a blue moon they’ll actually be useful and shoot a single tank down. For the most part, it’s all you out there.

There’s online multiplayer, and there’s little to say about it, since there’s so little of it to talk about. It’s just flying around as a team destroying others. It’s surprisingly lackluster, many gamers would’ve expected more here as well.

It’s a great game all around. There’s a few things you can criticize, but it’s a start of a should-be series. Hopefully, they’ll fix the small stuff and make this genre all it can be.