Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

With Ubisoft letting us know that they will brand just about anything they can with the Tom Clancy name (can Tom Clancy’s Assassins Creed and Tom Clancy’s Petz be coming soon), we now have received a demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX, a plane simulation for the current generation of console and PC gamers.  I will note that I use the term simulation very loosely for this game.

The HAWX demo gives you two options for play, the first being training, and the second being an operation in Brazil.  the problem is that the training was so awful, that I completely passed on playing the mission provided.  When you start up the training, you are presented a screen that is very comparable to games like Afterburner, Jet, F-15 Strike Eagle and many other figher jet sim games.  You get a view just above the plane, following it behind the turbine engines.  The controls were simple enough to pick up with a gamepad, and I was enjoying HAWX up until the moment they had me shift to a third person view that was kind of looking at the airplane from the side, but just a bit in front of it.  At that point, the game became almost unplayable.

I was trying to fight off drones, enemy planes, and even missles, all the time trying to figure out which way my plane would fly, because it seemed like it never when the way I thought it would in this weird view.  It took me nearly twenty minutes from that point to finish the tutorial, because you can never get a proper sense of direction.  I would not consider myself lame, and have played many a simulation, but this one was just horrible when it made you fly in that weird mode.  When I was able to switch back to a normal flight view, I progressed through the rest of the tutorial with flying colors.

Also, while the planes look good, the rest of the game is average at best, if only because my bad perception while flying put me up about 20,000 feet in the air.  I assume more of the missions will take place at lower altitudes so we can appreciate the the ground scenery.

I have to say that at this point I am probably going to skip the full version of HAWX.  the poor flight implementation when you have to go into the Action mode of flying really just put me off of the game.  I may not even rent it at this point in time.  For now, I will continue to go back to Falcon 4.0: Allied Force for my flight sim needs.