Starhawk arrived on the PlayStation 3 in 2012 as the follow-up to Warhawk, and it carries that lineage in plain sight. LightBox Interactive built it with SCE Santa Monica Studio, and Sony Computer Entertainment put it out. The headline addition is a single-player story mode — one that had been planned for Warhawk before it was dropped.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Build and Battle
The mechanic is called “Build and Battle.” Players raise bunkers, defenses, and armories while a firefight is already under way, which layers real-time strategy onto a third-person shooter. Offensive and defensive structures drop in from an orbiting ship, and the shooting keeps going.
It is fast third-person combat on a lawless frontier of space.
Emmett Graves and the Regulator
Graves works as a hired gunslinger, pushed out of society by his own exposure to Rift Energy. He is partly mutated but holds onto his humanity, because his friend Sydney Cutter built a regulator that sits in his spine and stops the change into an Outcast.
Graves and his brother Logan ran an outpost on the broken planet of Sever. An Outcast war party wrecked their rig, and both men were exposed. Logan turned. Emmett did not.
White Sands and the Outlaw
Mayor Jonas of White Sands, a small town on the planet Dust, asks Graves and Cutter to hold off an incoming Outcast attack while the town meets its rift energy quota for the Union, the main authority in the Outer Spur. They take the job for a price and push the attackers back.
The Outcast seem to pull out in their ships, and White Sands celebrates. Then the Outlaw and his band hit a Rifter freight way, and the cargo ship’s captain destroys it himself. The Outlaw is Logan.
Hawks and 32-Player Battles
The game has flying mechs called Hawks. A player respawns into a landing craft and steers it a limited distance to reach the fight. Like Warhawk, online battles run 32 players, 16 versus 16.
A co-operative mode is in there too, similar in concept to Horde Mode in the Gears of War franchise.
The Frontier of Space
The far reaches of space are the backdrop, with factions of humanity fighting over a rare and dangerous resource called Rift Energy. Colonies of humans known as Rifters have been working the “Frontier” of planets, and the Outcast — humans mutated into psychotic monsters by that same energy — threaten how they live.
It is the spiritual successor to 2007’s Warhawk.
Where Starhawk Lands
The story mode answers the gap Warhawk left when its own single-player plan was cut, and Graves gives it a face. Build and Battle separates the multiplayer from the shooters around it, because calling down a bunker mid-fight is a tactical choice, not a decoration. The Outcast are monsters by definition, which leaves them thin as antagonists, and the brother-against-brother setup between Graves and Logan is the sharper material the source hands over.
The co-operative mode is close in concept to Horde Mode. On the PlayStation 3, Starhawk stands apart as a shooter with a structure system and a story.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
