As soon as we were allowed onto the PAX showfloor, I made a beeline for the Ubisoft booth. I have made absolutely no secret in the past about my love of not only everything Tom Clancy, but also of flight warfare games. And since the press was allowed on the floor for a few hours before the regular attendees, there was not yet a line to get to play HAWX. So I grabbed the 360 controller and I was off.

As explained to me by Brooke of the Frag Dolls (who are acting as Ubisoft's PR team), the story of HAWX revolves around mercenaries. In the future, world governments have contracted so much of their war fighting out to private contractors that the contractors themselves are more powerful than any army. When the mercenaries realize this, they decide to band together and essentially hold the world hostage. You, as the hero of the game, are one of the few mercenaries left who has not joined the bad guys, and you are called upon by the governments of the world to lead whatever scraps of armies are left to defeat the evil contractors.

The demo mission I played took place in the skies over Rio de Janeiro. The sound isn't up on the demo booth, so I didn't hear exactly what the mission set-up is, but it boils down to "shoot the yellow targets". The game plays very similar to Ace Combat 6, although as Brooke pointed out to me, the controls are far more forgiving than Ace's. The left stick is your flight controls, and the left your camera. You can choose to have your camera be either in-cockpit, or a chase cam just behind the tail of your jet. The button lay-out will also feel familiar to Ace players; with a machine gun, homing missle, rudder control, and throttle.

I played the mission twice, first in an A-10 Warthog, and then in an F-22 Raptor. There was a noticeable difference in the way the two jets handled. The A-10 was slow moving but able to withstand a lot of flack, and thus better suited to assault ground targets; while the F-22 was fast but more easily shot down (what kind of army puts tanks on rooftops anyway?!) HAWX has added flares to the jets, which you deploy when there is a missle locked on to your aircraft. HAWX also has a rather innovative evade/chase system incorporated using the X button. Holding down the X brings up a series of triangles on your screen that, if you fly through in the correct order, get you to your target (or the missle of your tail) in the fastest manner.

Graphically, HAWX looked much better in person than in any of the lead-up videos I've seen. The city of Rio was photo-realistic (which is aided by the incorporation of GeoEye's sattelite imagery), right up to the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue on the mountainside. The battle got very hectic (think later levels of Ace 6), but at no time was I unable to figure out what was happening on-screen.

All in all, getting this demo time on HAWX has re-kindled my need to own this game. I am not yet ready to say it is better than Ace Combat 6, but neither will I say that Ace is the victor; it's hard to tell after only one demo mission. Sadly, HAWX has been pushed back to the first quarter of next year, but for fans of flight warfare it will be worth the wait.

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