Tom Clancy's HAWX 2 review (Wii)

It seems like your opponents in HAWX 2 suffer from the same movement malaise that you do, with most of them being little challenge to gun down. You won't see any tricky moves or tail-to-tail dogfighting--your opponents mainly fly in long, straight lines, only occasionally exhibiting complex or hard-to-track manoeuvres. Having your aiming tied to the remote makes the already easy combat even easier, because you don't even need to be facing your enemies to spray heavy machine gun fire at them. It looks even stranger onscreen--machine gun fire doesn't emanate from your plane's wings, but rather from behind as if an unseen wingman tracking your vehicle is doing the shooting for you.

There's only about six hours of gameplay in HAWX 2's single-player campaign, and there's little reason to play through the campaign more than once. The game does have a basic co-op multiplayer component, where a friend can join in with another remote and help out with shooting duties. This may be a neat feature for those wanting to share the experience with children, but because there's no difficulty spike when playing with a partner, there's no challenge at all. Playing a few single-player missions unlocks a top-down shoot-'em-up minigame, but since the plane controls here are even more sluggish than in the main game, it's not at all fun to play.

Rounding off this game's list of woes is its presentation. The game's world--from its skies and seas to its plains and mountains--are ill-defined and bland, so much so that it's sometimes tough to tell the difference between them. While the planes have a decent amount of detail, none of them sound realistic. The guns and various missiles you have at your disposal all sound like they'd be unable to blow a hole in paper, much less a heavily armed tank. The planes don't sound at all menacing, which is apt in its own way because HAWX 2 for the Wii certainly doesn't live up to the birds of prey its crack team of aerial aces are meant to invoke. HAWX 2 flops rather than soars and is a disappointing entry into this young franchise.