Oh I want to get away.. I wanna fly away ...
Graphics - the graphics border on outstanding, from up high things look awesome, from middle altitude it's good but not great and from low altitude it's average/blandish but never too bad, the explosions up close are a bit meh but from afar they're excellent, the good news is that @ 1650x1080 with 8x AA and maxed out settings (rig E8400 + GTX280 + 2GB ram and WinXP Sp3) the game is pretty much very very smooth, rarely drops below 60fps, of course in DX9.0 mode.
my friend tried it on his VISTA64 os with an ATi 4870 (non x2) and a common Q6600 2.4ghz cpu in DX10 , performance while a bit more variable was actually quite smooth (45-50fps average) which is great considering DX10 and all the bells n whistles were enabled, he had absolutely no problem or crash, i'm not saying the game is free of problems but each rig is different.
another good news, game is Multithreaded and will use all your cpu power (for example on dualcore cpu both cores will hit = 90-100%) this leads to great performance gains.
Sound - the sound was given a good treat in this game, you'll love all the chatters and noises you'll hear, works well in 5.1 and Headphones, the music is forgettable.
Gameplay/Story - You're a pilot, there's danger, you need to kick some a$$, that's to sum it up, you'll encounter lots of targets and you'll have to deal with them, the story (which is unheard of in a fighter game except the great oldie STRIKE COMMANDER) is actually half-decent and works well.
controls are a piece of cake, it's easy to pick up n play, it's hard to get the job done effectively later on in the game.
Conclusion...
i wasn't excepting much, but HAWX turned out a really good game, sometimes you just need an easy game to pick-up and play without worrying about studying a 200 pages manual, you got IL-2, FALCON4, LOCK-ON for that, and now you got HAWX as a simple but exciting game.
i recommend this game to anyone looking for a good yet easy to play jet-fighting game.
thanks for reading. :-)