Games That Nobody Plays Anymore: Warhawk
This article was written by: Nathan Hardisty
Warhawk. A fun title from Incognito, loosely based on the original PS1 outing, by loosely based I mean about as tied to the PS1 outing as a pineapple. Pineapples and Warhawks, what is there else to say? Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant multiplayer title, too brilliant in fact. It was a sizable downloadable game and a blu-ray title, released not too far back in the past. It was even constantly updated and patched, even big DLC packages were made, up until the end of 2008. But yet the servers are dying, everyone is tired of flying aircraft’s and we’ve all moved on. Well… I had to go back.
Warhawk has basically zero story, so I’m not going to take it into account, but it does have a premise. Eucadian and Chernovoan are two rival factions for some reason, fighting a fictional war, for some reason. We don’t know if they’re countries, clones, anything. All we know is that the other side wants the other side dead. The locations/maps are fantastically made, from a midnight industrial thing to an archipelago of various military bases. They all dice together into this package to create something truly enjoyable.
Thing is, there’s no single-player. You’d think this would be a bad thing, but it was actually removed because the developers thought it was inferior to the multiplayer supplement. Pretty good fan service, in my opinion anyway. There’s no real need for anything else except the multiplayer component, I’d actually find it hard to even imagine a single-player version of it. There would be a lot to change. Apart from multiplayer… that’s it, you jump into a game in ten seconds flat and then boom, you’re shooting people in the face. Servers are easy to connect to and I’ve never had a laggy game.
Warhawk plays like many other third-person shooters, its vehicle focused though as well. There’s tanks, jeeps, aircrafts and other vehicles available in the DLC. You basically run around, pick up as many weapons as you can get by and then shoot people in the face. It feels strangely freeform, and the fact that the maps are huge means that they can be pretty intense. When you get into a good game, you feel heroic and special, you can go around the back, take them from the front or from a distance. It all adds to a strange feeling of… freedom.
I do have a few complaints though, the controls feel a bit too tight and some of the weapons are kinda out of whack. The melee weapon takes just one swipe for a kill, the planes can kill anything and it can be quite hard to get a game going. When I say “Games That Nobody Plays Anymore.” I obviously mean “Games That Some People Actually Play, But The Vast Majority Of Early Don’t Anymore.”. But that obviously means it’s hard to get a game rolling. Such a tight, awesome experience just so happens to have to be multiplayer. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t work.
Warhawk doesn’t have singleplayer, it doesn’t have any bells or whistles of some titles. With all the overpriced DLC, you won’t get a bang for your buck. I wouldn’t invest in this just yet, I’d wait for everybody to leave. Then get a couple of friends around, and relish in the madness. It’s your duty.
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