Reviews// Starhawk

If you had a PS3 in 2007 and you loved a bit of online third-person fighting game then you almost certainly had a go on Warhawk. It took over the SPOnG Underwater Castle for quite a few months and managed to drag a 95% score from Tim's word processor before he went back to the fight.

Now the people who developed Warhawk at Incognito Entertainment have brought out a spiritual successor with Starhawk, after setting themselves up as Lightbox Interactive.

The major differences between the two games are the inclusion of a single-player campaign and the "Build n' Battle" gameplay mechanic. The first of these is a gussied up tutorial with a story that barely hangs together and largely uninteresting characters. The second of these saves the first and turns it into an actually interesting and very diverting game.

Build n' Battle is a system that enables you to deploy defences, vehicle spawn points and equipment lockers onto the battlefield in real time. All you need are a bit of space to drop them onto and some Rift Energy to build them with.

Ah, Rift Energy! If ever a there was a story justification bolted onto a gamplay mechanic that then went on to colour the whole game, it is Rift Energy. You can see that Build n' Battle was the main idea, and a great one too, but how could Lightbox justify the near endless creation of equipment and structures?

Obviously, you would need some form of in-game "currency" to "pay" for your equipment, so just like Tiberium in Command and Conquer, you have to collect Rift Energy. However, Starhawk is an all-action combat game and mining a mineral is boring, so you have to shoot it out of the bad guys. How do these "Outcast" bad guys get riddled with Rift energy? Oh, they're infected by it due to mining operations and general exposure.

And so the universe of Starhawk was developed. Imagine a western frontier town in space. No, scratch that, imagine a game set in the Firefly universe only instead of Mudders digging up ceramic clay, you have Rifters tapping Rift Energy into containers that are fired up lifter towers to orbiting tugs in order to meet a mining quota.

This is where you come in, you play Emmett Graves. Emmett was once a Rifter until his energy farm was attacked by Outcast "Scabs" and his rig was destroyed. This released Rift Energy that partially infected him and mutated his brother, Logan, into a full Outcast. Patched up by his friend Cutter, Emmett now acts as a gun for hire, assisting Rifter communities to make their quotas. For a price, of course.

The single-player campaign starts as Emmett and Cutter take a commission to assist the Rifter town of White Sands to fight off the attacking Outcast and meet their upcoming quota. A job like any other, except that White Sands is where Emmett and Logan grew up and it holds painful memories and the Outcast seem pretty well organised for once.

You must guide Emmett and Cutter through several encounters with the Outcast to get the Rift Energy out of White Sands and onto the Union tug. Almost every encounter introduces a new piece of technology that will become useful to Emmett, but will be more useful to you when you go online and indulge in some multiplayer mayhem.