Warhawk early impressions -- say goodbye to your life
Warhawk hit the PlayStation Store yesterday and the positive reviews have been pouring in. Our review is coming as well, but in the meantime we wanted to post our early thoughts on Incognito's impressive shooter. Even after our relatively short play time (~five hours), we feel confident saying that this is one of the most addictive online experiences you can have on the PS3 -- or any console for that matter.
It's worth pointing out though, that as good as Warhawk is so far, our experience was initially tainted just by the difficulty of just downloading the game. True, we did download it right after it was released but it took nine tries for Sony to actually add money to our PlayStation Store wallet. During this time, we ran into multiple PS Store errors and timeouts, saw images fail to load and generally experienced weirdness while trying to navigate the store. It was incredibly frustrating but after about an hour of trying, we finally were able to purchase Warhawk and queue up the 800 MB download.
Once Warhawk finished downloading and installing though, we fired up the game and messed around with the slick and intuitive menu system. This is where you tweak your controls, customize your character, set up clans, and find games. While there are a ton of options here, the layout is pretty straight forward and within no time we had a funky looking purple skinned avatar and had jumped into one of SCEA's official ranked servers.
The action in Warhawk is instantaneous -- there is almost no downtime whatsoever. As soon as you appear on the map, it is on. Within seconds you'll be engaged in firefights with other ground troops or you'll be hurtling down the road in a jeep packed with soldiers, all looking for somebody to open fire on. If neither of those sound fun at the moment, you can hope into a Warhawk for some aerial combat or jump into one of the defense cannons, looking to shoot down any pesky enemy planes in the sky. The amount of instantly accessible gameplay options is incredibly satisfying and help keep the pacing of the game fast and furious.
Part of what makes the gameplay so great is the fantastic job that Incognito has done at balancing all the different aspects of combat. So far it doesn't appear that any one vehicle or weapon is so overpowering as to break the game. Ground troops can shoot down Warhawks with rocket launchers, Warhawks can blast tanks and strafe bases, jeeps can run over ground troops and shoot at Warhawks with their mounted machine guns, and on and on. You aren't invincible in anything but you are deadly in everything.
We will be back with a full review soon, but in the meantime we're gonna go back and play more Warhawk. There is really nothing like this on the PlayStation 3 right now and is a breath of fresh air for game-starved PS3 fans. Though our opinions might change as we get more time with the title, right now we're prepared to call this one of the PlayStation 3's first true 'must-have' games.
