When you hear the name Tom Clany you firstly think of his books and movies such a “Hunt for the red October” with Sean Connery and “Patriot Games” with Harrison Ford.

Then there are his games through “Red storm Entertainment” Including the Rainbow Six series, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell Series. All of which are first person shooters in ground warfare. 

However this year Tom has turned his head skyward and has developed a Flight simulator / Aerial warfare game.  HAWX or High Altitude Warfare Experimental Squadron) take place between two of his existing games Ghost recon advanced warfighter 2,and Tom Clany’s End War. 

As far as flight simulators go it offers the standard options as many of the others, choice of planes which have to be unlocked as you progress, and basic missions including Escort missions, ground destruction missions and Aerial support missions for ground troops. 

This game does however try to include a few new gameplays which I found a bit of getting used to. One major one is the ability to turn the assistance off. When I say assistance I mean the normal first or close third person view like all other simulators. However when this is turned off the screen pans out further from your plane and shows both you and the target in the same screen. Quite often this means they are behind you and the plan becomes very difficult to control. Also this view does not assist when flying to slow, so if you drop you speed to much you will stall the plane will fall out of the sky. One advantage though of this view is the increased maneuverability of the plan allowing you to quickly turn and fire on enemies on your 6. Another new option in the game is the voice command which require the headset. Here you have 10 voice commands that can change weapons, launch flares, fire rockets, and change radar view to mane a few all by saying one word.   This was good novelty but I found this did wear off as you really cant have any other noise in the room. 

As for plan selection there are dozens that you can choose from all which have had input from the major makes like Boeing, Eurofighter Typhoon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. 

Gameplay and graphics are great as per normal however I found the missions could have had a bit more substance rather than the mandatory shoot and kill. Which to be honest it’s a flight simulator so there’s not much else to do.