Starhawk Review

Starhawk is a game that got really overlooked I think. Despite being less than a year old it’s now available for $20 new, the studio shut down after the release of the game, and there aren’t many people left offline. And that…well, that kinda sucks. This is the spiritual successor to the game Warhawk, which was released early in the PS3′s existence and got critical praise for it’s awesome multiplayer combining dogfights and third-person shooting for a really cool experience. In 2012 this concept was revisited as Starhawk. There were a lot of changes made to the game, between actually adding a single-player mode and giving the game a space setting and sci-fi themes. Neat! But does it work?
Well, the answer is yes. Pretty much. Single-player is pretty short and can be beaten in about a day but I recommend you play it. The game is heavily a multiplayer experience and the campaign’s main purpose is to train you for multiplayer, which it does a pretty decent job of. The core of Starhawk is the “Build and Battle” system, where you use “rift energy”" to drop down buildings from the sky. You have a huge variety of them to pick between that you unlock at a pretty steady pace throughout the game. Though it may not be immediately clear, each of them do have a purpose and are all useful at different parts. You can call down turrets, outposts that call for backup to come and help you, garages that contain jeeps, and even mechs and tanks, later in the game. You’re given a lot to work with and it’s critical to learn how all of them work to get you through the game (please, don’t be like me and rely on almost entirely outposts and turrets until the last few levels, you will regret it). The reason this system works so well is that the variety in drops to pick between lets you play however you want and you’ll need to get used to switching playstyles frequently throughout the game. Some chapters will need you to play defensively and carefully, while others will be more suited to just calling down a tank or mech and going crazy.

The story of Starhawk is nothing to write home about, but it does have a few interesting bits. There’s a valuable source of energy known as rift energy, which “Rifters” (miners for said energy) go around the galaxy collecting. However, some of these Rifters are directly exposed to this energy and turned into “Outcasts”, basically powerful space mutants corrupted by it. They’re protective of this energy and protect rift-mining sites, making the job for the Rifters a lot harder. When Emmett Graves and his brother Logan are attacked by Outcasts, they’re both exposed to rift energy. While Logan fully converts into an Outcast, Emmett’s good friend Cutter creates a device to keep him human. Emmett and Cutter soon make a job out of flying around and protecting rift mining sites from Outcasts for the Rifters. But later on, the Outcasts find a leader: The Outcast, or Emmett’s brother Logan Graves who had been corrupted. There’s some interesting interaction between the siblings but other than that the story isn’t particularly good.

Main character Emmett Graves isn’t particularly memorable, but he’s cool nonetheless.

What IS good is the way this story is told. It’s carried by stylish, comic-styled cutscenes with voice-overs, reminiscent of the InFamous series. The voice acting is a little funny at times but otherwise it’s easy enough to take seriously. The campaign of Starhawk isn’t the focus, but there was enough focus put into it…well, at the beginning at least. The first few missions are super varied. You’ll be shooting with a big arsenal of guns to choose from, riding around on futuristic bikes and jeeps, dropping all kinds of buildings to defend yourself and help stop the Outcasts, and soon enough even flying through space and getting into dogfights, similar to StarFox. They’re hard to get used to at first, but once you master your hawk (your flying mech ship) you’ll be having a blast. My one gripe with the dogfights (and the game in general, now that I think about it) is that it sometimes feels like it takes forever to do something. Your swarm laser is your primary weapon besides your machine gun in your dogfights, but it feels like it doesn’t do much. You can get a complete lock on an enemy and watch 8 lasers fly at it and smash into it, but the ship barely even looks damaged. You can do it again, and it’ll still be flying almost perfectly normally. This weapon is however the easiest to find ammo for, so at least it’s balanced I guess. Aiming is actually pretty hard in the game, so you’ll need to look out for other weapons as often as possible. Other weapons make things more interesting, such as the super-strong but rare homing missile and the difficult to aim but deadly cluster bombs. The game is hard to adjust to, and admittedly I didn’t really understand it for the first half or so, feeling that Emmett was very frail and enemies took too long to kill. However, once you begin fully utilizing all of your drops and thinking strategically, you begin having a lot more fun with the game.

Starhawk’s dogfights are really fun once you get the hang of the hawk.

But like I said earlier, the campaign’s main purpose is to prepare you for multiplayer, and the pacing is pretty good for that. The game starts easy and holds your hand for a while, but becomes really damn difficult at the end. You’ll have to learn some really good resource management skills with your drops in order to pass through some of the later chapters. Speaking of the later chapters, they seem to forget what made the earlier chapters fun and useful; they stop introducing new drops and weapons and start just throwing as many enemies at you at once as they can. And once it seems like it’s over, more enemies. And after that, more. Chapter 8 in particular is very guilty of this. In conclusion, the campaign is pretty good, but slows down at the end. I recommend playing it before jumping into multiplayer for sure. And another thing, the music makes you feel like a complete badass. It’s an awesome western score through and through that makes everything feel epic and exciting.

Speaking of which, let’s move onto multiplayer! This was meant to be the main appeal of the game, and many critics have literally said it’s the best multiplayer experience on the PS3 to date. I usually suck at multiplayer shooters, but I felt I had learned the ropes pretty well through the campaign and hearing all the buzz about how great the multiplayer experience was had me really excited. So I jumped on and was immediately stunned at all the options. There are 8 game modes, plenty of player customization, a big variety in maps, everything looked awesome! …but upon playing, I was disappointed to see that the online community has kind of died out. I joined a capture the flag match that supported up to 32 players, but there were only about 4 on each side. I sat in the match for ten minutes trying to get the other team’s flag, but since the map was huge and I only had 3 teammates, I was killed and the flag was returned fairly quickly every time. I imagine with 16 players on both teams this mode would be great fun, but I guess I don’t know for sure myself. I also joined a team deathmatch game which did have more players participating, but not even close to the 32 player limit. It sucks because with the awesome mechanics of the core game, such a plethora of options, and what seemed to be pretty decent netcode, I know for a fact online play must be great and diverse. However, seeing as so few people bought the game…well, I guess I won’t really know for myself.

The graphics are super-detailed and space looks beautiful.

At the end of the day, Starhawk was built around it’s multiplayer, which a year later, has very few people playing it. And that’s a damn shame, because it got nothing but praise and it seemed like it would’ve been amazing with more players. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did with it. Seeing as that’s the fault of the community and not the game itself I can’t take points off for it, but keep in mind that you might be a little late to the party if you buy this game now because it seems like multiplayer has been a bit inactive for a while. You’ll still get into matches, but they’ll likely have too few players to work well with the huge, expansive maps. But since the game is only about $20 now, you’re paying that much for a pretty good single-player mode and a potentially amazing multiplayer mode, so I do recommend you pick it up if you get the chance. While I am disappointed I didn’t get to experience the awesome multiplayer in it’s prime, I can tell it would’ve been amazing with a good amount of people, and the single-player was pretty good itself. More than worth the money to me.

8/10