Warhawk Hands-on Preview

When the PS3’s controller was shown for the first time at Sony’s press conference on Monday, I was more than a little sceptical. The new motion-sensitive control function seemed like a reactionary gimmick, and other than the button in the middle of the controller, the design hadn’t changed much over the Dualshock 2 (apart from lacking force feedback of course). Fortunately, after some hands-on time with Warhawk on the show floor (sadly the only game on the floor supporting the motion feature), I’m pleased to report that the controller works extremely well, but how does the game itself fare?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I was hoping for a bit more from Warhawk; a whole lot more. When you compare what was displayed on the show floor to the trailers and screenshots released prior to this event it’s hard not to be pretty disappointed. There’s not a whole lot of ‘next-gen’ here, and the game has a striking resemblance to Crimson Skies, both visually and mechanically. Textures don’t fare that well either, and aside from the decent distortion effects from the ship’s afterburner, Warhawk looks suspiciously current-gen – albeit a nice high-resolution one. To be fair to the developers, a lot of work is still to be done, so things should improve.

The demo takes place on a lone island with enemy ships lurking about. The landscape is roughly the same size as, well, the first level in Crimson Skies. You can weave in and out of canyons, blast away at the said ships and that’s about it. I had seen everything the demo had to offer in less than two minutes, and spent the rest of the time fiddling with the PlayStation 3 controller, before moving on to the next kiosk.

At first control is a bit awkward. Your hands will subconsciously try and move back to the analogue sticks and at times I found myself moving the controller up when I meant to go down (damn those inverted controls!). Likewise, I noticed a bit of a delay between my movements and the craft’s on the screen – mostly quick jerks to the left or the right to avoid a cliff or enemy ship. After a few minutes of play time though, those jerks quickly turn into subtle movements of the controller, which resulted in a much more fluid flight experience. By the time I had left the demo, I had taken down three battleships and a handful of drones, while only crashing two or three times. Still, I swear it was the controller’s fault…

Since this is E3 and games are obviously early in development, I can’t be too critical of Warhawk. The demo is short and small in scale, offers only a few minutes of solid play time, and is quite obviously far from finished, but I have plenty of faith in the team at Incognito Inc., and I’m sure that come this November, any doubts that I have will be put to rest.