Flight sims used to be a lot of work. There were stalls and radar modes and aspect angles to consider. You could only carry so much fuel and never enough ammo. Each game had its own camera system for tracking targets, checking instruments, and admiring the graphics. After a mission, you had to fly home and land, which was often the hardest part. There was a constant balancing act between smooth frame-rates and attractive graphics. You needed a good joystick and probably even rudder pedals if you were serious. It was truly a hobby, like fly-fishing, but without having to get up early or apply sunscreen.

Now there are action games like HAWX, which is far too noncommittal to qualify as a hobby. This is just a glib modern action game, with wonderful support for some terrible multiplayer games, the usual ho-hum great graphics, and mostly simple gameplay except for the times it's infuriatingly difficult.

Confused? Read the review after the jump.

Speaking as an erstwhile flight simmer, after all those years of steep learning curves, it's nice to just press a button and get straight to the spectacular explosion. That's pretty much how HAWX works. You'll blow up damn near a hundred things every mission. You'll stop caring how good it looks after the fourth or fifth explosion. There's a reason we only have the 4th of July once a year. Fireworks every day makes them less special.

HAWX is ridiculously easy at first. For about four or five missions it's "Is that all?" easy. But then comes the bit where you have to fly using the expert mode. You might have an easier time than me, but here's where the game very nearly nosedived into the dirt (literally, on a couple of occasions). The camera popped out to a fixed third person perspective so it was like flying a remote control airplane. Only this remote control airplane did weird little visual tricks where I couldn't always tell which way it was pointing. Was my plane's nose pointing towards me or away from me? Or some extradimensional combination of both at the same time? It was downright Escheresque. It didn't help that I was supposed to be doing fancy skids and tail slides worthy of an air show. All the while, I was trying to line up shots on equally nimble targets, many of which would eventually be shooting back at me.

And here's where the wonderful easy gameplay pretty much vanishes from HAWX. Imagine strapping a Pratt & Whitney F100 turbofan engine to a goldfish flopping around on the floor. That's nearly 30,000 lbs of thrust on a 2 ounce fish. You can do the math on the thrust-to-weight ratio there. And when you consider the lack of control surfaces on a flopping goldfish, you get an accurate picture of me using the expert flight mode. I mostly stick to the cockpit view, and I can brute force my way through the tough dogfights, making liberal use of the ability to restart from checkpoints in the middle of the long missions.

But what keeps me going in HAWX is a system of challenges, experience points, and unlockable aircraft. It's a bit like the perk system in Call of Duty 4. As I play, I go up levels and unlock new aircraft and payloads, which I can then use to revisit earlier missions to accomplish more challenges. How many times have I saved that stupid oil refinery in the middle of the desert in mission three just so I can rack up experience points? But this system doesn't hold up. Somewhere around level 15, it becomes apparent that the aircraft don't have a lot of personality. Being an airplane nerd, I really enjoy unlocking, say, an F4 Phantom or an A7 Corsair. I'd rather do that than buying the little figurines out of the gumball machine in Resident Evil 5. But it's disheartening to realize that there's little reason to fly these different aircraft, whose differences are all but erased in the blur of missile trails, lens flare, and explosions. Also, it turns out that over half of the challenges for leveling up are based on playing online. And here's where I suspect I'm going to punch Elvis.

There's co-op support, which is a welcome touch if two people want to play a shallow action game. It's particularly nice that players can take different kinds of aircraft into a mission. One guy takes the air superiority fighter and the other takes the ground pounder. There's not a lot of variety in the missions, so deciding who's going to do air-to-air duty is pretty much be the extent of the co-op challenge. But how about the team dogfights? Crimson Skies on the original Xbox proved that airplane combat can be an awesome context for online multiplayer deathmatches.

So I jump into the first game I find. It's one guy sitting in the lobby. He's selected an A-10. An A-10? They're slow, piggish ground assault aircraft. Who's going to take an A-10 in a fight against other airplanes? So I select an Su-27, one of the more maneuverable air superiority fighters I've unlocked. The poor guy doesn't swap out of his A-10 even after he sees I've saddled up an Su-27. Oh well, it's his game to lose. I hit ready and wait. I figure he's going to hold off until more people join us. But he doesn't. He starts the game. It's me in an Su-27 against him in an A-10. What a mismatch. Sucker!

I spot him pretty quickly, but for some reason, he's got a special icon on his plane implying that I can't target him. And sure enough, I can't. We close and he immediately shoots me down while I'm still trying to get a lock. This happens a few times. Then he's doing fancy stuff like launching drones. How'd he get drones? And he keeps shooting me down and activating some sort of jamming power. We get into a turning fight and he manages to outmaneuver me, probably because he's using the expert flight mode and I'm doing my usual goldfish flop. I try to slide my nose around to line up a shot, but since I can't get a lock on him, it doesn't do me any good. When the score reaches 7-0, I quit out. We're supposed to play three rounds, each to ten points, but I don't have the heart to get shot down thirty times while I try to figure out what the heck is going on.

I know what you're thinking: "Check the manual, Tom." Believe me, I did. I love manuals. This one is no help. It has something about support powers, but I don't know the first thing about how to activate them. Where are my support powers? Why can't I have support powers? How come he gets support powers?

Flight sims aren't what they used to be. But then again, neither am I. Time was I was happy to deal with steep learning curves, but I especially have no patience for steep learning curves in glib multiplayer action games where an A-10 achieves instant supremacy against an air superiority fighter. So I'm just going to sulk for a while and regard HAWX as an occasional single player diversion for those times I want a high ratio of explosions to playing time. Maybe I'll go back online when I finally unlock the A-10.