I hate the "Sequels that sucked" thread because about half of what everyone bitches about there is actually good, and I also want to be long-winded, so here we go.
I liked the original HAWX. Plenty of people bitched about the third-person camera option, mostly because it was unplayable and unrealistic. I don't think anyone who did actually played the game, because it made several dogfight-oriented missions overtly
easy for me, and I'm not the best gamer around. As for realism...yes, because it has a plane on the cover, it must be a flight simulator, not a shooter. There's a reason why the simulator genre is half a step away from absolute death; actually flying a plane in reality takes work, and it's fucking
boring as shit.Naturally, when HAWX 2 was announced, I enjoyed the idea that I would get more arcade style ludicrous so-close-you-can-see-the-whites-of-their eyes air combat where missiles don't have proximity fuses. I probably wouldn't buy it, because I won't buy any of Ubisoft's games with their terrible DRM (c'mon, ubi. You let the RUSE guys take it out. Take it off of Assassin's Creed 2, for fuck's sake.) Fortunately, I have a Gamefly subscription, so I can rent it and if it turns out as entertaining as the first, I could just pay fifteen bucks less than new (as opposed to Gamestop's five bucks less than new, Gamefly is great for this alone) to keep it.
Hoooo boy, is this fucker going right back into the mailbox.
To start with, someone at Ubisoft clearly heard the complaints, but it's unclear which complains they heard. The ERS system, the in-game explanation for why you can have a crazy seat-of-your-pants third-person camera whenever you want, seems to be retconned out of existance except for a couple of occasions when the plot calls for it (a similar mission to one in the original where you must use the ERS guidance function to plot a flight path through ridiculous AA coverage so you won't get shot down.) Otherwise, it's just plane wonky. Assistance Off mode, the third-person camera, has been nerfed. You no longer get a lead-indicator for your guns in this mode, which means they're impossible to aim. In the original, it would appear as a 2D object on the 2D hud and thus make it easy to line up shots, but from the 3/4 perspective, there's just no way to eyeball it. If you stall, you're booted back into Assistance On mode.
Assistance On mode is even worse; in the original, if you were having trouble nailing a target, be it a persistent plane or a ground target with lots of cover, you could use the pathfinding function to plot a course that would bring you to a definite killshot. It had the tradeoff of being much slower than manual maneuvering, so you could, in theory, use this to line up every plane in the sky, but it would take ten times longer (longer than you had before those planes blew up the objective you had to protect, usually) to actually kill them all.
This is now
completely absent. So we've addressed the complaints by keeping the underlying framework but removing functionality and thus adding fake difficulty.
Oh, but the fake difficulty goes up to eleven with the AI. There is absolutely no effort put into the AI. Your wingmen are immortal, but their shots do a fraction of the damage yours do. Enemies are generally lazy and stupid, so to keep you on your toes, they drop flares at timed intervals. Literally, you can see them dumping flares when they aren't even being chased by anything. Unless they're aces, in which case they spend their entire time flying as close to you as possible so you can't line up a shot.
And then there's the plot.
Good lord, the plot.
The original had a stupid plot. It's a Tom Clancy game, of course it was silly. It was, at least, entertaining. There were good guys, bad guys, you shot the bad guys. The end was somewhat anti-climactic, but the story progressed in a logical manner.
Then you get to HAWX 2, where the plot becomes a massive train-wreck of biblical proportions. People who can't make sense of Modern Warfare 2 will likely have a brain hemorrhage with this. You first start off as the original's player-character, who is quickly captured by terrorists. Then you switch to a UAV operator tapping phone conversations to learn where he is by flying his UAV over the people making the calls. Then you play missions as a British Royal Navy pilot and a Russian Air Force pilot.
Then you play gunner of a Spookie gunship covering the mission to rescue the original player-character, who becomes mission control for the new protagonist you start as in the next mission.
Yes, in the first six missions, you play as six different characters, and it's ludicrous on top of it. The plot, at this point, can still make logical sense if you're paying attention, but it's not long before it devolves into a bizarre attempt at a conspiracy where some superior officers betray you because they're working to overthrow governments and it's all at the behest of secret shadowy people who control everything. Part of the problem is that you
keep switching characters and some of them have absolutely nothing to do with the plot; the Brit is the big offender here, who could almost be completely removed without anything being missing. Also, in what I can only imagine is an attempt to keep the cast of player-characters from ballooning out of control (because they didn't realize it already had,) your pilots are suddenly also UAV operators between missions, including one instance where you have to do so in mission and
operate a UAV while flying your plane. Let's get something straight here.
Most arcade-style air combat games are absurd and unrealistic, that in itself is not the problem. Ace Combat is absurd. Ace Combat is also awesome, because it's charming, plays well without being frustrating, doesn't take itself too seriously and makes you care about what's going on. Ace Combat 6 is, in fact, generally unpopular among fans of the series because it has silly characters with much less charm and this, in turn, makes you care less about what's going on. HAWX 2 takes itself
way too seriously. It acts like it's hard-hitting political and social commentary when this clearly wasn't the intent. Even Ace Combat 6 had consistent storytelling and it didn't ask you to believe that a combat pilot would also be in charge of a UAV mid-flight. This is the biggest reason the first HAWX is just plain better; it didn't take itself nearly as seriously.
It gets particularly ridiculous near the end where the British pilot disappears and you assume permanent control of the American protagonist, while the Russian pilot is now plot-relevant enough to fly with you on your missions. But every player-character is a silent protagonist, so he's directly spoken to by others, but never speaks, while you aren't even playing as him. Of course, your wingmen, who have had absolutely no character development, die in the last mission, one in a heroic sacrifice that tries so,
so hard to be bitterly ironic but falls so unbelievably flat it might as well have a RiffTrax. Your wingmen in the original at least had banter during rest moments, and actually felt like other people. In HAWX 2, I often forgot my wingmen were supposed to be actual characters, even though they're named in the beginning.
Of course, there's also an Obligatory Nuclear Bomb detonated at an Important Place, in this case the oil refinery responsible for 80% of Russia's oil supply, so now they have to invade Norway to steal oil while America and the UK are like "We should stop the unexpected Russian invasion? I guess?" It's like someone at Ubisoft said "Here's ten thousand dollars to make a game with, and you have to rip off Modern Warfare's 2's plot as incoherently as possible. With a little bit of World in Conflict for good measure."
Oh, and the conspirators behind everything? They're mentioned in the last mission and never brought up again. There isn't even an ending, you just get told you saved the world as you get a dramatic flyby of your plane. And you can't even select your plane or load-out per-mission anymore. The scripting relies heavily on handicapping you by giving you weapons that deliberately make the objectives harder or more complicated than they need to be.
Playing this game has actually made me want to re-install the original, because it was actually fun and though nothing close to high-quality writing, made sense. It had some actual production value and direction, the sequel has neither.
The moral of this story is that Ubisoft needs to get rid of AC2's terrible DRM, because replaying that right now would be like washing a terrible taste out of my mouth.