Thanks to some last minute shenanigans I only got 20 minutes or so with Warhawk today on the Playstation 3 debug during the first of what I hope will be many Warhawk Wednesdays.

Once a week the devs are hosting a bunch of journalists in the game, letting us try out the multiplayer. Unfortunately, the game has no offline play, and no instructions, so everyone in the game was still trying to figure out controls, the map, the objectives, all that sort of stuff.

Beyond the confusion, the game was quite a bit of fun.

I spent most of my time on foot, running around trying to shoot people and blow things up. The controls were pretty snappy, what you'd expect from a shooter.

I also tried my hand at driving around in a jeep and a tank, both of which were easy enough to grasp. The tank wasn't quite the drop-in-and-drive experience I was hoping for, but the learning curve wasn't that bad.

The Warhawk itself was tricky, especially when jumping into the only one on a map usually meant you were blow to bits in a few seconds. I finally dropped out of the game and lucked into a second server with no one in it, giving me plenty of time to figure out the flight controls.

The graphic were pretty solid, though not the same level as something like, say, Resistance. The game managed to support 20 players with zero lag, but of course we were the only ones on the servers. Still, nice performance.

Overall, I was pretty impressed with the game. Sure, it's not the next big thing for the Playstation 3, but it was hella fun. And with it being a downloadable game, I have high hopes for a very reasonable price.

I'll make sure to drop back into the game next week for a bit more of a taste. Brian Crecente

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