Troubled Skies
Warhawk has all the makings of an absolutely killer online experience... if Incognito can work out the kinks.
Published: September 9, 2007
And sure, Warhawk shares much of the addictive fun as the Battlefield games on the PC or even general deathmatch games like Unreal Tournament, but there are two things that set the game apart: the scale and the level of detail in the game. It's possible to spend hours doing nothing more than dogfighting against other Warhawks, just as it's possible to never hop into a plane. Such is the kind of fun that Incognito has packed into the game.
It's this scale, the ability to fight on a level-wide scale or concentrate things in capturing and holding a point in the game that gives it so much meat. Though you can play strict Dogfighting or Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch modes, the game doesn't really show its full hand until you jump into a Capture the Flag or Zones match.
CTF matches are largely what you've played in other games, but there's the added advantage of capturing a spawn point, which not only allows you to jump back into the game from a position closer to the enemy flag (not to mention makes for some great back-and-forth tug-of-war sessions with the other team), but adds much-needed additional resources like vehicles, ammo and health refills, plus nets you the all-important points needed to rank up and unlock more goodies for your player and Warhawk.
Zones takes the capture and hold mechanic, plus all of the bonuses you get for holding a point like vehicles and weapons, and expands upon them by an order of magnitude. If you can capture points close to each other and grow the bubble of influence until they touch, you can make the bubbles even larger, but if an enemy point has grown big enough to block the expansion, you're limited in the kinds of weapons and vehicles you can grab from that location. It sets into motion a never-ending see-saw game of control, and Zones is fun enough that were it the only mode in the game, like Battlefield, it would be worth buying just for that mode.
It's not, of course, and again because of the scale of the battles, the ability to jump in and out of vehicles to fight on foot or make a mad dash across the huge maps, there's a massive amount of freedom. It also means there are plenty of ways to score points, which get added to your overall totals (when they actually work), and along with earning a ton of medals (a la Resistance), you're given an almost RPG-like progression for your player. Granted, it's just customization options, but half of the fun is just trying to "level up" your character while performing the tasks needed to earn the medals and ribbons as well as the points to hit your next rank.
Unfortunately, some of the objectives can be a little confusing. Much of the initial Warhawk experience is just jumping into a game and learning by experimentation. The first time you do just about anything in the game, a little help window will pop up to explain it, but given that this often happens in the middle of a firefight, some players will just look through the help text to try to kill a dude with their newly acquired flame thrower. The descriptions of medal and ribbon requirements are even more vague, making it unclear about whether you need to get the necessary kills or time in a single life, over the course of the match or cumulatively.
