Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 8: Tom Clancy’s U.B.I Soft

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

“This video game is not sponsored or endorsed by the U.S. military”—credits, Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X

For eight months I’ve been discussing games that represented the end of the Aughts in the best, worst, and ugliest ways. They naturally also represent the Aughts as a whole, because they’re the result of its hopes and dreams. Borderlands made a genre that became a mainstay of the 2010s, but it was also a zenith of obnoxious 2000s humor. Plants vs Zombies was the epitome of a design philosophy that receded badly once the decade ended. But let’s expand this in a different way: what about other things that represent gaming back then? Specifically, what about companies? Because the behavior and attitude of corporations like Nintendo, Sony, and Valve drive the industry as much as any blockbuster. The sleaze of E3, the birth of online storefronts, the interest in motion controls and DLC, and the way all of these were sold were cultural drivers. But one company in particular might give us a look into what it meant to make, sell, and play in the Aughts.

Image: Source Gaming. Basic gameplay of H.A.W.X The game’s Series X backwards compatibility is limited; you need a physical disc to play it. A consequence of some licensing issue, I’m sure, but good on Microsoft for supporting it at all.

As a pithy narrative, Ubisoft’s rise to glory was meteoric. The product of five brothers (one of whom, Yves Guillemot, remains CEO), it began life in 1986 as a plucky French mail order startup. Slowly it turned into France’s biggest gaming company, expanding steadily into the European market. By 2003, when the name changed from “Ubi Soft” to “Ubisoft,” their growth had gone even further: founding studios around the world, getting deals for licensed games of varying quality, and making acquisitions. That’s the origin of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; they bought the Prince of Persia IP from The Learning Company. And that’s the origin of Assassin’s Creed, which began life as a Prince of Persia sequel and whose sequels would define the “Ubisoft style” of game. You know, maps filled with a billion markers, towers to liberate, mechanics that interact systemically, content thoroughly reused not just within games but between them. Ubisoft’s turn in the mid-Aughts, and how it grew even further a decade later, was emblematic of changes to the industry. Addictive open worlds, aggressive growth, and truly global blockbusters made by several studios in tandem; Ubisoft did not invent these things, but it sure helped codify them. This is exemplified most through a game from 2009, Assassin’s Creed II, which took ideas they had been playing with and marshaled them into something new. It was both a guiding light and the capstone to their growth as an industry pillar.

One major part of this shift came in 2000, when they scooped up Red Storm Entertainment—and crucially, the rights to games based on or inspired by the works of Tom Clancy. This initially meant the somewhat niche classic Rainbow Six, but things burst in 2002 with the release of their Metal Gear Solid killer Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. The ability to lean on Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon gave Ubisoft a lot of breathing room. While they were licensed in the sense that they were based on a person’s brand, these were firmly within the company, different from their adaptations of characters like Batman, Donald Duck, and Irish soccer manager David O’Leary. Ubisoft bought the rights to the Clancy name in perpetuity in 2008, long after Clancy himself had any involvement in these games, but for players that connection was probably already assumed. This melding of license and original property, of mercenary needs and artistic drive, represents the journey the company took from being a seller of quirky gems and shovelware to being one of our biggest publishers. Clancy’s ghost still haunts their studios, as it does for the entire field of military video games.

Image: Source Gaming. Pretty much any briefing mission; note the incomplete dialogue line and naming a carrier battle group after Andrew Jackson. Clancy’s books and the “techno-thrillers” they pioneered often overloaded readers with details. It meshed well with 21st Century overload in our art and media.

Perhaps surprisingly for a company who has dined for so long on the name of a self-important, reactionary crank of a novelist, Ubisoft presents itself as smarter, cultured, inclusive, and, most importantly, non-confrontational. When Assassin’s Creed gave players the job of murdering the Christian and Muslim leaders of the Third Crusade, it started with a preface explaining that it was made by a multicultural team with no desire to kick off religious or ethnic strife. They often have diverse protagonists (who they may undermine by sticking them with a heteronormative backstory or giving an olive branch to knuckle-dragging racists). Their mascot is Rayman, an adorable limbless hoodie monstrosity. The worlds of Assassin’s Creed are meticulous museum pieces, while Far Cry and Watch Dogs are deeply systemic games built around interlinking mechanics. They waffle publicly as to whether their games are political or apolitical, even when their work openly engages in political discourse. Though they’d never say as much, they at least softly posit themselves as kind of a high minded European counterpart to bloated American giants like Electronic Arts.

Under the hood, however, lies a festering rot. Michel Ansel, the wunderkind programmer who invented Rayman and directed Beyond Good and Evil, was viscerally abusive to his staff. Sexual and labor abuse have been rampant across studios. And management was, as it turns out, fully aware of these things. These discoveries came to a head in 2020 when dozens of current and former employees made accusations of misconduct, and today the publisher’s reputation as a toxic work environment is well known—particularly amongst European programmers, many of whom have been avoiding Ubisoft to such a degree that their studios face critical retention issues. Quantifying which company is “worst” is a question with no good answer, but this one rivals EA and Activision as one of our industry’s cruelest institutions.

Image: Source Gaming. A mission where you have to defend Washington DC from an armed invasion. Ubisoft would gain some notoriety within the decade of this game’s release for having obviously (and often clumsy) political content in their games but denying its existence. I’d assume the same would have happened with H.A.W.X had it come out a few years later—especially since it happened with multiply Clancy games.

But back to Clancy. By the time Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X came out in 2009, the idea that he was particularly involved in these games was firmly gone. He had co-founded Red Storm, but his involvement was always primarily as a tool of branding. And really, his books had been using ghostwriters for years. But even with all of this, H.A.W.X feels rather… out of place. The defining staple of Clancy’s writing, an obsession with technical realism underneath paranoid but efficiently-told “techno-thrillers,” is sort of here; it’s a military flight simulator with a wild plot. It’s also part of the Clancy games’ soft shared universe, situated between a Ghost Recon sequel and the forgotten EndWar. You even save the Ghosts in an escort mission. But it’s also bombastic and far from the claustrophobic buildings Sam Fisher or the Rainbow Six explore. For whatever reason, shooting homing missiles at waves of tanks and helicopters feels less grounded than sneaking through a compound with super night vision goggles. I can’t explain it.

While I picked H.A.W.X for this project, I had some concerns. For one thing, a dopey fighter jet sim about blowin’ up bad guys seemed ghoulish after watching almost a year of sustained and ongoing aerial bombing in Gaza. Throughout the campaign’s eighteen missions, COs would compliment me for how well I targeted “PMC convoys” and “terrorist camps” or explain that our oil state client had “evacuated” civilians, as a way of sidestepping the fact that I was obviously killing scores of people and leveling whole towns. The politics of the “Clancyverse” (which is separate from the Ryanverse, the shared universe of Clancy’s books) glamorize intervention, so it sees no moral quandary in, say, the US government sending you on an incursion to bomb rebel encampments in Mexico. That’s Level 1. Ignoring its place as a topic of the 2024 US Presidential Election, the idea of sending American troops into Mexico is mind-bogglingly insane and something that shouldn’t be presented as cool. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the planes you fly are on loan from military defense contractors: Dassault Aviation, Norththrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Saab. Yep, this was a collaboration between the Rabbids publisher and the target of 2024’s wildest class action lawsuit. This wasn’t abnormal for the era; many war games receive support and branding from these kinds of war profiteers and further the military-industrial complex. So from a political, philosophical, and moral perspective, the game reads as absolutely ghastly. Reprehensible.

Image: Source Gaming. In “Africa”—not a joke; that’s all the description you get—you bomb bases with the F-4G Advanced Wild Weasel, a plane mostly identified with the Gulf War. It was made by McDonnell Douglas, who merged with Boeing in 1997. Bombing targets nets you EX.

I had these on my mind throughout the adventure. When I saved Rio de Janeiro from a coup, it was impossible to imagine I wasn’t causing collateral damage with every shot that failed to hit its target. When I was flying through Chicago to stop an invasion, I noticed that tanks were placed in such a way that your homing missiles would often fly straight into apartments trying to hit them. Every time I booted it up, I saw that list of military contractor logos. And beating the epilogue—which entails sneaking up on the villains’ compound and extrajudicially bombing it—rewards you with the notorious F-35. I think I’m comfortable calling this an evil game. But overall, those were more passing, mild discomforts (I’m expecting Modern Warfare 2 to be a worse experience in November). It’s the gameplay, honesty. Moving the plane feels great, and the mission structure is surprisingly varied. Maybe it’s not great that the game feel of piloting jets that are used for real life murder papered over my pacifist concerns, and yet…

One side effect of both the Clancy brand and the flight sim genre is that controlling each plane carries a level of technical precision, a kind somewhat rare for the 2009 A-listers that stood far above this game’s budget. You have controls for speeding up, stalling to make sharp turns, turning on your side, slightly nudging yourself left and right, and at no point do you feel like you’re playing anything other than a plane. The biggest concession to broader audiences is a technique that gives you a recommended flight path for dodging fire or sneaking up on a target. This was an era that obsessively zeroed in on mechanical perfection in exactly one area: shooters. But the FPS and TPS have limits, and H.A.W.X is a great example of what you can get with a control scheme that isn’t based around moving a human being.

Image: Source Gaming. The big Chicago battle is hard for reasons good and bad, but it’s one of the times where the weight and size of your plane feels real. It’s extremely easy to crash into a building, and doing a cool dive between skyscrapers is near impossible.

As for that story, it’d be gleefully stupid were it not for the tone: dead serious, as was the style at the time. You play a pilot who, upon that aforementioned mission in Mexico, is hired by the private military contractor Artemis. The story is parceled out in strange briefings and over the coms during missions, bringing you into a version of the 2010s that ceded war to private enterprise even more than the one we lived through. You go through a few theaters of war, listening to the CEO whine about his stock portfolio. And after you’ve spent a couple missions providing support for American forces quelling a Brazilian insurrection, you discover that Artemis has switched sides—like, they’ve suddenly decided to give the coup an entire navy. Soon afterwards, this one company’s battalions are marching in Chicago, their destroyers plowing into Tokyo Bay, their thieves stealing nuclear missiles and destroying satellite networks, and their tanks literally falling out of the sky to blow up NASA bases. And (except for that Tokyo level, which stars a different character to explain how the back half takes place over only 72 hours) it’s all up to ace pilot David Crenshaw to save the day. Not “Dan Crenshaw,” horrible American politician. I kept getting that wrong in my notes.

Perhaps the most dated thing about H.A.W.X is not its politics but its aesthetics. Those briefings are bizarre things, all 2000s-era hyper-quick editing like what you’d see in Taken or Fast and Furious. The dialogue in the missions are borderline incomprehensible, and I was never sure if Crenshaw was a silent protagonist or the masked pilot whose lines can’t be distinctly heard (the credits are unhelpful on this; no actor is listed with a character. Though it did confirm that Steve Blum was here, along with like three other games in this series). There’s also no subtitles for dialogue, something you’d expect from Ubisoft today, though given how much stuff is on the screen at once that might’ve led to cognitive overload. Well, more cognitive overload. It’s kind of a nightmare of targets, friendlies, circles you have to avoid or enter, and constant stats.

Image: Source Gaming. The third to last level features a mammoth battle where you protect multiple army units and lay waste to a compound. Between them and the dozens of enemy targets, it can be hard to figure out exactly what and where everything is.

This sheer level of information is just one way in which the game is actually kinda tough. Players have access to several quality of life features, like that recommended flight path or generated targets, but I still struggled on what felt like every other level. Aircraft can be hard to hit, almost every stage incorporates a tough escort mission of some kind, and while your default homing missile attack is reliable, the secondary weapons demand a lot more. “Operation: Stiletto” starts with you flying blind, segues into dodging death fields as you blast installations, and demands you protect a team of bombers, but my most powerful rocket missed most of the time. The reason was because the mechanics of the Guided Missile—you have to keep your target within a reticle until the missile reaches it—were only explained in dialogue I couldn’t parse and one non-repeatable line of text. There’s no “prologue,” no tutorial. Which is honestly nice in some ways, but this had more friction than I’d expect from a game made just a few years later.

The eighteen missions are often complex. They have a variety of unique dangers and win conditions, though despite offering multiple options, usually one and only one plan is worth doing. In Tokyo, there’s no reason to do anything other than shoot down the planes in a specific order and then destroy the boats. In Cape Canaveral, you have to prioritize the carriers to stop them from dropping tanks. And in the climatic Nedava bloodbath where you cover for three battalions at once, you can only dutifully jump from one to the next. In that sense, it’s very true to the spirit of late Aughts gaming, where linearity was aggressive. But it’s frustrating, partially because it highlights that this game drags the further it gets from the purity of zipping through dogfights. Some things feel tacked on; there’s this fancy wide camera perspective that seems to have no material value. The writing is terrible, naturally, but the way every character barks at you exacerbates these issues. And, like, did this game need experience points?

Image: Source Gaming. The linearity is taken to its greatest extent in a number of late game missions in which you must sneak through guarded areas by following a laser pathway. Based on the recommended routes you can ask for, this completely throws out any kind of self-direction because you’ll otherwise either be shot down or have to start the flight path again.

So that’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X: a goofy, instantly dated game that’s a lot more fun to play than to think about afterwards. But… I’m not sure that’s all. Because this isn’t just a game from the last year of 2009; it’s a game from Ubisoft, who released that much more important game in 2009. After all, Assassin’s Creed II set them on the path of overstuffed map games. For them, it was the future. But what was H.A.W.X? Where does it lie in Ubisoft’s story?

My take is this: H.A.W.X is not a grand birth; it’s not a grand transition. It is simply an end of a field of game design that struggled with the rise of HD. It seems to have no impact on the trajectory of modern flight simulators, and outside of a sequel released just one year later has no legacy of its own. And I think it’s also metaphorical as an end of one era of Ubisoft. It’s not as though they weren’t making other games like this. But I do think you can see this as signifying a line between what the company was like in the Aughts and what it became in the Tens. One side had annualized Tom Clancy’s games and Totally Spies shovelware, and the other had annualized Assassin’s Creed, reused Far Cry maps, and Aiden Pearce’s iconic hat. This game might be, for all intents and purposes, the Goofus to AC2’s poorly-conceived Gallant. A road perhaps best not taken.

Mechanically and tonally it feels cosmically apart from the Ubisoft of today, a company that goes so far out of their way to appear anodyne that they make other publishers look like bulwarks of radicalism. They fear controversy while repeatedly making games that court it, like stealth ‘em ups that glamorize conspiracy theories or RPGs that allow for queer protagonists (which shouldn’t be controversial but unfortunately is). Yet despite their seeming cluelessness in repeatedly claiming an apolitical stance with obviously political art, they also have some self-awareness in their image, none of which is here. This is just dumb militarism without a fig leaf to hide it. I’d also expect a game from them to be thorough, almost patronizing, in how it teaches you, but you’re just thrown in to a degree that’s pretty fun. The protagonist is, again, a nonentity, not an icon given near the focus of an Ezio Auditore or Marcus Holloway. Narratively, you spend the whole time being browbeaten over the phone, and the world is… well, Ubisoft map games are shallow, too, but this is literally just a 3D map with targets and buildings. The publisher boasted of its collaboration with GeoEye, using satellite imagery to make believable landmasses; they are charming, but not necessarily so much so that you could feel any sense of realism. With none of the smorgasbord and scale that defined and smothered games like Watch Dogs or latter day Far Cry, this is a game about doing one and one thing well: making you feel like a fighter pilot.

Image: Source Gaming. One thing H.A.W.X does share with Assassin’s Creed II, and many Ubisoft games, and most games of the mid- to late-Aughts? Bad bosses. Boss fights didn’t gel with the themes of the Seventh Console Generation, and they were either removed or done poorly. This game’s stab at the trope is with this futuristic super-battleship you have to pound at before the time runs out. It’s dumb and kind of charming in its dumbness.

My theory might have a few small caveats. Well, at least one big one in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X 2, and that also got a Wii version that was effectively a different game. Plus, it’s not like more recent Tom Clancy’s games have been significantly more enlightened. Elite Squad, a forgotten 2020 live service that did feature H.A.W.X content, had an opening implicitly linking Black Lives Matter to a terrorist conspiracy. Splinter Cell has always mixed American jingoism with paranoia, long after Clancy’s death. Beyond the brand, plenty of modern Ubisoft games have subplots, DLC, or backstory that are dumber and reactionary. And plenty of their stuff eschews open world bloat for this kind of hyper-specific gameplay—For Honor, for instance, and even those open worlds are obsessed with thick systemic design. But if we’re willing to take this as a bit blurry, as we should with cultural signifiers, I think there’s something here. It’d be nigh-impossible to imagine Ubisoft making this game in 2024. Granted, it’s hard to imagine them making much of anything new with all of their cancellations and focus on established IP, but the laser focus on specificity and utter disinterest in storytelling feel fully at odds with the company behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Watch Dogs Legion, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Today, the Clancy license is still big, if not as big. 2015’s Rainbow Six Siege became a surprising hit for Ubisoft and is still supported today, albeit not without controversies of its own. The Division, which feels just as disconnected from the author as H.A.W.X, became an early loot shooter standard. Most notably, the brand has been central to Ubisoft’s repeated and somewhat strange attempts at building a Marvel-esque unified brand. New shooter XDefiant lacks the Clancy name, but it features characters from Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and The Division. Far more bizarre is the brand’s role in the awful Netflix crossover anime Captain Laserhawk, which features the Rainbow Six as murderous sentai heroes and Splinter Cell’s Sarah Fisher as one of the Assassin’s Creed Templars (it also features Rayman as a coked-out fascist propagandist, which has nothing to do with Tom Clancy but is staggeringly uncomfortable to watch). As far as I can tell H.A.W.X is not in either of them, just an awkward appendage on the IP with some very sincere fans.

Image: Source Gaming. Using the Guided Missile to protect Air Force One from enemy aircraft. In many of these missions, the real challenge is to figure out the intended route and stick to it hard. However, I recall this one being a bit softer on that.

That’s perhaps deserving. Games like H.A.W.X feel outdated, even if the brand is still going and ugly war shooters can still be big business. They’re aggressively stupid. But I also think this has something the biggest games of the 2010s would miss: a tight focus on a single basic idea. Looking at the kinds of games its publisher would prioritize, I think we could’ve stood to see more big games that carried that level of precision. But just the precision, if you please. No more product placement for military hardware.

Next game: 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.