Reviews// Warhawk

Graphics
Graphically, the game stands up extremely well under the harsh light of our flipping huge, HD, wall-mounted television. It is impressive, there’s plenty of detail going on, there is pop-up evident but it doesn’t detract from the game.

Textures and shadows stand up to close scrutiny throughout. Bear in mind that you see the landscapes - from Eucadia’s sunset reds, the streets and towers of The Destroyed Capital via the Badlands harsh, contrasty stone and Archipelago’s shimmering seas – from every conceivable angle. You can fly them, you can drive them, you can walk them, you can cower in them, and each map keeps you in the game.

Sound
Well, there’s little to say here other than ‘It just works’. Explosions work. Slashing death grunts work. Machine gun fire works. Land-based rocket launchers make satisfying gear grinding noises as they attempt to target anything. Ack-Acks go ‘boom-boom-boom’.

The background music sounds very much as if it should be significant but, frankly, in game-play the vaguely martial, sort of Star Trek Next Generation ‘tunes’ merely fade into the part of your mind that says, “Urgh… music, how is that going to help me take the tower”. So, while it’s worthy and not too annoying, it’s equally nothing to write home about unless you’re crouched down in a bunker with only a pistol for company, no health, and nothing else to write home about.

Game-Play
That, as you young people say so I’ve been told, is what I’m-a talking about. The graphics and sound - as I’ve pointed out - do exactly what is expected of them, and do it in spades. But we’ve all seen great looking and sounding games that played like My Chemical Romance without the studio overdubs. It’s how the game plays that’s the most important thing to your ancient, year-encrusted reviewer.

Brilliantly is how it plays. Like The Ramones circa 1977-78 on day 121 of a 366-day tour; tight, fast, adrenaline-fuelled, hands-down brilliant. Okay, for those of you who don’t get that reference, here’s the detail.

Warhawk is as easy to get into as a champagne-filled bath packed with babes who also have degrees in the subject of your choice. Once you’re in there are occasional frustrations (I am talking about the game here, not the babes and the champers, focus your attention gods-damn-it!). The ones that leap to mind – from the combined SPOnG-mind are:

1) You can’t bloody run anywhere. Non-vehicular motion is all at one speed (unless you’re falling off a cliff into the beautifully rendered water and death). The lack of sprint is really disconcerting at the outset of the game, and it does force you into the various forms of transport available.

2) People do not appear on the map view unless they are firing weapons. This means that people with The Knife simply don’t appear.

3) Vehicles, bloody great tanks for example, show up on the map as white when they are unoccupied, red or blue (depending on team) when occupied and firing but when occupied, moving and not firing they occasionally show up and occasionally don’t. The consensus here is that this is something to do with line of sight which kind of defeats the object of a map view.

4) Ground-based gun emplacements – from small, mounted machine guns, to enormous ground-to-air missile launchers are white when unoccupied and then coloured when occupied even if they’re not firing. This inconsistency is a niggle but can occasionally result in a tank ‘creeping up’ on you.

5) Building deformation. There isn’t any. Okay, now I’m looking for the moon on a stick, I know. With 32-players online, beautiful backgrounds, bullets, rockets, air chaff, sniper shell trails, blood and vehicular movement with little or no lag, the idea that you should be able to utterly destroy more than a lamppost is possibly pushing the niggles a bit. However, the fact that a tank can be held up by some sandbags kind of pulls the suspenders of disbelief down over the ankles of reality.

6) Server settings: when you set up your PS3 to host a game (which, I’m sure you will, being the sociable kind of person you so obviously are) you can’t save your settings. Yes, you can save the rotation list of the maps you want to serve, setting up timings (for gods’ sakes turn off Spawn Delay!) but you can’t save the name of your server. Nor, strangely, can you run a ‘Ranking Server’ – that is a server that enables players to level up – and play on it at the same time. The former (settings) is a pain in the neck but not a fatal flaw. The latter will I’m sure, result in Ranking Servers becoming incredibly rare properties as more people join in.

7) There is currently no 7. We have heard of system freezes and network outages – as I said, we’ve suffered from the second one once – but we’ve not had the first.