Tom Clancy's HAWX is easy and dumbed down if you're used to playing Wing Commander games. It's pretty perfect and what you'd expect for a flight sim in 2009.
I'm not sure how, but every fighter can literally carry hundreds of bombs/missiles. Guns and afterburner ammo/fuel are unlimited. If you're not any good at dogfighting, hit X and a series of virtual gates (Ring Game!) appear in the air and you fly through them and it delivers you exactly on the tail of your target. Checkpoints keep you from having to replay more than a minute or two of anything if you die. All of this might be appalling in 1999, but they're all pretty much required gameplay mechanics in 2009.
Hawx does a ton of stuff really well though. The graphics are outstanding. The sense of speed and flying is great. Just zooming around is fun thanks to these two things, and to top it off, there is a free flight mode that lets you fly around any of the maps, and many of the maps are accurate representations of real cities made with satellite data. On top of the simplified flight mode, there's the bonus flight mode that lets you pull all kinds of crazy maneuvers while forcing you to worry about stall speed and aerodynamics.
Experience, promotions, unlockables and the ability to go back and play any mission are great features (comparable to medals and mission branching in WC) that Hawx pulls off very well. The game has an incredible number of accurately detailed fighters (fifty or so), and it's pretty rewarding unlocking them all - plus paint schemes, weapons loadouts, etc.
The game has standard multiplayer stuff, plus it has four-player jump in/out coop throughout the entire story campaign. They managed to come up with an interesting plot that gets you into fighting with all kinds of modern superfighters without doing some kind of World War 3 thing. It has cool continuity tie-ins to Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell too. Really fun game overall.
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