It seemed almost natural to play these games back to back, even if I didn’t intend to do it that way. I’m not quite sure why I dropped AC6 way back in 2007. Other things probably came up and it was just a tad too ridiculous for me to find it engaging. Fast forward to the 2009 release of HAWX, which as a general fan of the Ubisoft Tom Clancy franchise, I felt inclined to play. By the time I finished HAWX, I felt like I should give AC6 another chance.
As for the gameplay, I can really only speak to the level design. I’ve discovered that I hate bombing missions. The one good thing about old Space Sims is that by the very nature of the setting, crashing isn’t even a consideration. You can just focus on dogfighting other fighter craft. HAWX on the other hand emphasizes bombing – and while the bombs themselves are fairly easy fire and forget type weapons, it’s still a pain to try to hit a target while trying to avoid smacking into terrain. There’s even a mission where you’re forced to fly under a certain altitude through hilly terrain for the majority of the mission. High pressure? Sure. It’s just not quite as fun as trying to chase down an F-18.
As for AC6, while the bombing is relatively simplified because of the option to use fire and forget bombs, they’ve replaced the frustration with the classic Star Wars trench run. Fly down a tunnel in a jet while being shot at by turrets and aiming for a target that you only have one chance to hit. Again, the tension is ratcheted up but since the margin of error is fairly low (especially on a higher difficulty), there is a large potential for frustration.
But, as Yahtzee said in his review of HAWX, there’s something satisfying about chasing down another plane and blowing it out of the sky – even if it’s boiled down to pointing and clicking – and there are more than enough missions in both games where you do just that.
In terms of story conveyed through gameplay and level design, both games rely on scripted sequences to try to inspire what I would tentatively call “cinematic moments” or more specifically, the type of climaxes found at the height of action sequences in war films. The turning point in HAWX is when Artemis, the PMC that your character flies for, switches allegiances against the United States because the enemy (a generic separatist terrorist organization) has offered them a better contract. In the game itself, this is represented by an Artemis fleet suddenly appearing on the map after the completion of a mission, demanding the immediate withdrawal of American forces. With patriotic fervour, your wingman declares that he can’t fight against Americans and suddenly you’re tasked with destroying the Artemis flagship in order to save an American carrier group.
For what it tries to accomplish, I suppose it’s perfectly adequate. But for some reason, it just wasn’t all that inspiring. Now, one thing to point out is that most of the Tom Clancy games are now made by Europeans or Canadians (a fact that Tom Clancy himself might find ironic in between dips in his gold plated pool filled with thousand dollar bills), and I suppose this is just a twisted view of nationalism and patriotism that non-Americans seem to believe that Americans are consumed with. It’s a far cry from the type of story found in American war films or even Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4. Alternatively, it might just be horrible writing and presentation – and given that Ubisoft doesn’t publish credits for the games anywhere online, it might not be fair to place the blame on Ubisoft Romania.
Speaking of presentation, one of the lauded features of the game was that it takes place during Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 – and indeed, the first mission in the game has you flying into Juarez in order to support Captain Mitchell. It’s a great concept that I was really looking forward to, simply because the moment referenced in GRAW2 is one of the better uses of the “cinematic moment” in games to this day. Unfortunately, the actual mission in HAWX has nothing in common with the mission in GRAW2. Then there’s the fact that they didn’t even bother to hire the same voice actor to play Mitchell. Sure, gruff American soldier is a generic voice that anyone can do... but if you’re going out of the way to reference a character that you’ve used in other games, at least have the foresight to hire the same voice actor as well.
Ace Combat 6’s “cinematic moment” comes late in the game and it’s surprisingly similar to the one found in GRAW2. You’re tasked to destroy some biological weapons, which is fairly simple it itself, and then you are told to pull out and return to base. As you begin to fly home, wave after wave of enemy fighters begin to engage you and you soon begin to realize that the odds are against you. And it’s for this reason that I found the moment in AC6 to be more engaging and emotionally affecting than the one in HAWX. Speaking for myself, when I saw that I had to somehow take on a dozen or so fighter jets with just a single wingman for support, I thought I was going to “die” (or at least, lose the mission). It’s a classic manipulation of the sense of agency that a player has when playing a game. Barring survival horror games, typically a player has a tremendous sense of power over the game world and by suddenly overwhelming the player, the designers are hoping that – at least for a brief moment – the player will feel overwhelmed and become anxious.
And just as suddenly and unexpectedly as the game removes agency from the player, the game returns it to him in the form of allied forces appearing in the map to provide support. It’s quite literally the game version of the cavalry appearing from the distance to save the protagonist in the nick of time (such as at the end of Saving Private Ryan when American forces arrive to stop the German advance). By returning the power that was temporary removed from the player, the game is able to manipulate the player into feeling a sense of relief as he realizes that he is no longer in any imminent danger. Hearing an ally tell you that he’s here to help you is as cliché as refusing to turn on one’s homeland, but the way it is executed in AC6 allowed me to temporarily forget that I’ve experienced this moment many times before – in games and in other media. Running in my head was the thought that I was glad I wasn’t going to “die” and have to repeat the mission, which is probably as close as a game can come to replicating the danger of real world combat.
Moving on to the actual stories of both games... they’re both fairly obnoxious in terms of how shallow they are, but for very different reasons. I don’t want to go into any real detail because plot summaries of both games are available on Wikipedia, but I will say that if I had to choose which one I liked more, I would have to go with Ace Combat 6. The story in HAWX was just pure bullshit that makes Metal Gear Solid 4 seem like a well considered white paper on the precipitous future humanity faces as private military corporations begin to capitalize on the everlasting demand for soldiers and weapons. Just like the current season of 24 (season 7), for some random reason a PMC wants to destroy the United States... but there’s no real compelling reason why they’d want to take over America or what they’d even do if they actually succeeded. And even then, most of the footage they used for the “cutscenes” (or over-glorified Power Point presentations) in between missions was recycled from other Tom Clancy games. I think they probably shouldn’t have even bothered with a story at all.
Ace Combat 6 on the other hand is disappointing in that the storytelling is so heavy handed. It would almost be an insult to anime to call this story anime-inspired, even though it’s clear that’s where the game is drawing its inspiration. Essentially (and quite like Valkyria Chronicles) a country is invaded by an unprovoked aggressor and you have to fight to save your homeland. But as the story unfolds, it’s clear that this is an anti-war story. I think I’ve touched on my feelings about Japanese anti-war stories in my Valkyria Chronicles post. While it’s strange seeing an anti-war story from the Japanese perspective (for a variety of reasons – the most notable one being that the game received assistance from JASDF), at least they’re trying to do something “more meaningful” with the story than their Western counterparts.
That said, it just seems that Japanese game writing seems to be clunky as hell. While the narrative is split amongst several characters, let’s focus on Melissa Herman. When the game opens, we find out that her husband is a pilot in the air force that you yourself fly in. A typical war movie would just be happy with having the character discover that she is a widow through a messenger or another soldier. Not Ace Combat 6 however. No, Melissa finds out that her husband has died when she walks by the wreckage of her husband’s jet on her way out of the city. And of course, there’s the “Go Dance with the Angels!” line that is used throughout the story. It’s supposed to be an elaborate way to curse someone (dancing with the angels implies that one should be shot down by pilots) but it just becomes a joke by the time the game ends. I have to assume that it was better in Japanese and the translator/localizer did the best they could when trying to come up with an English equivalent. Either way, Japanese game companies should simply hire anime writers/directors to work on the story for their games to avoid problems like these entirely.
Finally, I just wanted to touch on the music. Wikipedia lists Tom Salta as the composer for HAWX... which is slightly disappointing because I think his work on the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games was excellent. Unfortunately, no tracks really stood out this time. The Ace Combat 6 soundtrack on the other hand works well with the game. The track that they used for the trailer (the “Invasion of Gracemeria” theme) is probably one of my favourite pieces of game music. In fact, I’m not surprised that they went all out and released a 3 CD OST in Japan.
There was some other minor point that I wanted to write about... but it's long since left my head unfortunately. Hopefully it'll come to me again some time in the future.
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