Warhawk (PS3) – First Impressions And Manual (PDF)

Earlier this evening I purchased Warhawk for the princely sum of £19.99 from the Playstation Store. With the impending game congestion – Halo 3 (360), Sega Rally (360) , Zelda – The Phantom Hourglass (DS) and Operation: Vietnam (DS) – starting next month, I simply can’t wait until the 21st Sept for the retail (Blu-ray) version. The Playstation Store download is also £13 cheaper than the retail version (which does however include a headset).

Gripes about downloadable version of Warhawk:

• Very little online documentation – So no idea how the online ranking system works.
• Took ages to find a server which I could join – Due to the lack of documentation.
• What do all the weapon/item icons mean? – Wait, that’s because there’s no documentation!
• Tied to one PS3 account – It’s only playable on my account, for ever. No sharing allowed.
• No headset – Personally I don’t care, but some people might.

Fortunately, I found a pdf version of the Warhawk manual (via Google). It’s 2.3mb in size.

The lack of documentation was especially annoying, as I was repeatedly being kicked from servers because (as it turned out) my online rank was too low. Yeah, I’ve just started, so I’m going to have a n00b ranking. There is nothing in the game that explains how to find a suitable server based on your rank. Or what all the icons mean in the server select screen. Then I found the server filter options and 370 out of the 450 servers (available at the time) disappeared, leaving all the n00bie friendly ones. Yay, I could finally start playing.

The game is great fun to play. I really loved flying one of the Warhawk planes, until I was rudely blasted out of the sky by some git using an anti-aircraft gun. Also I don’t care what anyone says, running around firing missiles (using the man-portable radar homing missile launcher) at other people is just fun. There are other weapons you can use in ground combat, but they just aren’t as fun as the homing missiles. You can seamlessly switch between air and ground based combat which is good. Assuming all the planes on the map aren’t occupied that is. If they are, just blow someone out of the sky and eh voilà, vacant plane to find and fly.

Right, enough of my first impressions, I’m off to play some more.

Update 8th Sep 07: So far the game is great, the network code is not and need fixing (badly). I’ve yet to get on a Sony server, so I can improve my non-existent rank. The way it takes bloody ages to say that you can’t join a game (and it doesn’t give a reason) is rubbish. At the moment the developer has frozen Warhawk’s stats and ranking tracking until the network issues are resolved.

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