Conclusion

On the ground, Warhawk is a little less fun, but only a little. As we said you can go completely on foot and fire hand weapons, grenades and even land mines designed to destroy land vehicles. There's a two person jeep (one drives and the other fires a machine gun) and a tank (one drives and fires the main weapon and the other fires a machine gun). There are machine gun placements to take out on foot enemies but the most fun is taking control of the anti-air turrets. One is the classic WWII style of machine gun that fires widely in the air, surrounding targets with flack. It's suprisingly effective. The other is the powerful missle turrets which after a few seconds can lock onto a plane and blow it out of the sky if you are lucky.

Visually the game is a treat with some excellent and rather unique level design for the game, from a desert level to a European village setting to a really impressive island based level where the plane aspect of the game is really put into focus. The graphics really look good for a multiplayer title with impressive modeling for the planes and some great lighting and visual effects. Seeing a plane get destroyed in a huge explosion in the sky is something to behold. The game currently has four modes; standard deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag is included but you also get Warhawk's variation on Battlefield's standard Capture mode where teams take and hold onto spawn points on the map. The game allows the maps to be small for eight player battles or expand to their full size for large 32 battle. Leaderboards track your stats and compare them to other players and you can even launch your own dedicated server for people who want to run their matches 24/7.


Warhawk is definitely not as deep as the Battlefield series in terms of amounts of weapons, vehicles and items but that's actually part of its charm. There's something to be said for a game that let's you just start playing without a lot of introductions or instructions. The gameplay is fast and furious, especially if you hook up on a 32 player match. The physics of the game are a little wonky (if you are on foot you can fall from a tall structure or location and there's no damage) but that's a quibble. We do have some concerns about how the final game will be marketed, however. So far Sony has declined to say how much they will sell the game for download on the Playstation Store. We hope that the game won't be sold online for more than $30 when it is released unless they release more levels than the five that are currently available in the beta (the game will also be sold as a retail product with a Bluetooth enabled wireless headset). It's also a good bet that Sony will offer downloadable expansions for the game after its release; what will the costs of those expansions be like?


However, those concerns are for the future. For right now, the multiplayer beta of Warhawk has turned out to be a far different and more enjoyable experience than we were expecting. Having full featured downloadable games like this gives Sony a bit of an edge over Microsoft in this area who seems to be content to offer small Xbox Live Arcade games rather than larger offerings. The beta test period is scheduled to run until June 25; if there are any major changes to the beta before it ends we will post an update. We also hope to get more info from Sony on their release plans for Warhawk in the near future before its planned release later this year.