So I recently bought my cousin and I Hawx 2, after beating the first game together, I was looking forward to working through the second one, unfortunately, Hawx 2 co-op is broken, especially the Steam download version. I’ve read through thousands of forum posts about people messaging Ubisoft and Steam only to have them blame each other. I’ve read about people opening ports, and trying a variety of methods, only to end in frustration.

You’d think in this day and age, making two computers talk to each other for networked gaming would be easy, as we’ve had LAN gaming for over ten years now, but they still manage to make a mess of it.

While I know this is a first world problem, and not really all that important in the grand scheme of things, I do think that game developers should have to fix issues related to marketed features. If you market that your game has co-op, then you should have to fix any repeatable, provable bug related to getting co-op working. It shouldn’t be an “oh well…” scenario while the game developers move onto their next big budget franchise.

Also, Steam should provide best effort support by making sure such feature limiting bugs are pushed to the users as notices before purchasing. Something along the lines of “this game has been known to have issues with co-op game play”. It might have been enough to save me the trouble, frustration and money and helped put Steam back in my good graces regarding their involvement with this issue.

Lastly, I don’t understand why the Steam version specifically has so many issues. How or why is it any different than the versions from other digital download systems or the retail hard copies?

I shake my head to think that in 2011, a top tier company with a triple-A title, pushed onto the most popular digital download service can have so many problems with what amounts to network gaming, a feature that has been included in hundreds of games over the last fifteen or so years.

Note: I only bought this game to play co-op. I don’t enjoy flying games normally.

Update: So I got multiplayer to work after setting up a peer-to-peer VPN network connection. Unfortunately, the game ended up being a bit worse than the original game. My cousin had a worse time with it than I, despite the fact that he was killing three planes for every two that I shot down.