Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X

When I heard that the Tom Clancy franchise would be doing a flight combat sim, I got a little excited. The only flight games I'd previously been able to get into were the Rogue Squadron series, and that was because they were dumbed down for Star Wars fans (like me!). I figured that a Tom Clancy take on the genre would be similarly simplified, and from what I saw in the demo that seems mostly true.

The story is expectedly trite, you play as part of an Air Force For Hire company that gets in the middle of some civil unrest in a country no one cares all that much about. It's just a light frosting on the real cake of the game, which is the titular High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron. Somebody finally made a fighter jet so easy to fly, you can do it from your desk while watching TV and chugging a beer.

The demo consists of two missions, an intro training flight and a mission which I assume comes from an early part of the retail game. The controls are the only thing I was really concerned about - as they directly impact how fun flying around like a jerk will be - and though they threw me for a minor loop in the training mission, after that I was able to get the hang of it pretty easily. Basically there are two control modes, one assisted by your in-flight computer, which plays from a cockpit view and is like a normal flight sim; and the other plays from a third-person view, where your pitch/roll controls take on a more movement-intensive role to compensate for the camera. It's a bit unintuitive, but this "free" mode is generally easier to fly and makes it a breeze to take in your surroundings and sortie with other airborne targets.

The mission in the demo was fun, but I found it pretty challenging, even though the demo only allows you to play on the easiest possible settings. It constantly kept me busy with enemy fighters, incoming hostile water transports, tanks, bombers - basically there was shit everywhere. I'm not quite an expert yet on evading enemy missiles, but I might give it a few more runs to see how much better I can get.

It's not something I'm on the edge of my seat for, but HAWX seems like just the thing to fill the flight sim gap in my more recent gaming activity. I might consider picking up the full game once it's less new/expensive.

Progress: Played the Steam demo