Warhawk was first released back when the PS3 was in it's first year of release, before I owned one. I didn't buy mine until 2008 when I had decided there were a few exclusives I wanted to own, and the price had come down to a point where I thought it was finally time to buy it as a Blu-Ray player.
Fast forward two years. I own 6 or 7 PS3 games (not counting the downloads) and this 365 game challenge has caused me to rent almost every PS3-exclusive game I ever wished I had played from Gamefly. Some I've liked so much that I've purchased them (Mod Nation Racers, God of War 3, Ratchet and Clank) but most of them have been games I am very glad I never bought.
Warhawk is one of these games.
I know there was a lot of hype around it (and it may still be beloved by many people out there) but I absolutely hated this game. I can understand what people love about it, because the concept is awesome. This is a multiplayer based combat game, similar to Battlefield 1943, where you can control soldiers, vehicles, turrets and planes. They're all modern (or futuristic) in function, which in concept...makes this a much more exciting game than BF1943 was. Three years after the launch, people are still playing it every day online and I was looking forward to trying it out with them.
The first thing I wanted to do was take the tutorial. I learned the ground combat first, and thought it was fairly awful. The controls leave a lot to be desired as far as combat accuracy goes, and it's third person instead of first.
"No matter" I thought to myself .
"The game is called Warhawk, so certainly, the best part is going to be the dog fighting".
The jeep, tank and turret training missions left as much to be desired as the combat training had, and before I knew it, I had blown nearly half an hour learning to play this silly game. Finally..it was time to fly planes....only that sucked too. Honestly, I can't remember playing a flight game I've enjoyed less than this one. In recent history, I have played Snoopy Flying Ace, the aforementioned 1943, two Iron Man games and even Dark Void... and I think they were all better flying games than Warhawk.
Something about the controls in this one is just "off". There are almost a dozen different weapon tutorials for the planes (and you have to complete each of them before you graduate your flight tutorial)...and I played them all. It's not like I didn't try to learn this, I did...I just hated it. I even tried setting the controls to inverted to see if it would make the experience more like what I thought a video game plane should feel like, but alas...it did not. No matter how I had my controls set, the plane controls were loose, unresponsive and frustrating.
Even though I wasn't enjoying the tutorial much (even the CPU drones were murdering me with their missle attacks), I decided to go online and check out the real game anyway. After all, if I didn't play the actual game...I couldn't really review it, could I?
First thing I did was set up a match of my own. No one joined it. Maybe they knew I sucked.
I joined a public match and was immediately on the ground. It wasn't "fun", but after flying the planes, I actually enjoyed the ground combat a little more. Go figure.
I jumped into someone's tank and used my machine gun as a turret while they drove us towards enemy buildings. My partner ended up crashing, so I jumped out and climbed a sniper tower. The ability to have so many different types of combat in one game is awesome, I just wish it was fun to play as it sounds.
I died a few times before finding the airport in the map I was in. I had my choice of plane, and I decided to see how flying was in multiplayer. I flew over enemy territory (my teammates seemed to have them pinned down, so I actually got to fly for awhile). I strafed soldiers with my machine guns and swung around to take a run at their base. Suddenly...boom...I was blown from the sky by enemy missles. Again...this sounds kind of cool, but in practice...it felt a lot less fun than it sounds.
It was around then that breakfast started sounding pretty good.
Overall Score? 4/10. This is another one of those games that did not live up to the hype for me. If I were a PS3 owner in 2007 when there was almost nothing worth playing for the system, maybe I would have liked it more...but today, it just sucks ass. Plain and simple. YES...it has an awesome feature set, but no, I don't think it's any fun to play at all. Not only will I never play this game again, I would heartily recommend to my friends that they avoid it as well.
Trophies? The only ones I got were for surviving the tutorial missions, and that's ok with me.
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