It would seem I’ve misjudged the community’s opinion of Starhawk a little in last week’s WeView. You see, despite there being a lot of love for Warhawk, that doesn’t seem to have extended over to Starhawk.
The biggest indication of this comes from our resident expert on the Hawk series (is that a thing?), Chris. The man has clocked up nearly 700 hours in Warhawk, so you’d think the jump over to Starhawk should be pretty natural for him right? Sadly this doesn’t seem to be quite the case. Despite his love for hawks when they’re at war, and even the beta of their star based brethren, he reports that “…Starhawk just hasn’t grabbed me the same way.”
[drop]Why should this be so? Well he notes that “It’s very difficult to get good at Starhawk…”, which is a fairly significant problem. However, he does have some praise for the game when played using the Zones mode. He calls it “…a natural fit for the excellent concept of build & battle…” and says that it’s where “…the brilliance of the game is revealed…”. However, outside of this mode he found that the game has significant problems with balance, which is a significant issue for any multiplayer title.Bilbo_bobbins found similar problems to Chris, noting that they too loved Warhawk but gave up on Starhawk after a month or so. Their main fault with the game was “…the very one sided part of the game.” Ultimately though they could still find a little praise for it, saying “…it has many things wrong with it, but it’s great fun when the matches are full and not very one sided.”
On the other side of things we have Dom El, who was generally positive about the game, saying that they’ve enjoyed it “…from the Beta through to the retail game.” They didn’t just enjoy the multiplayer side of things either, finding the single player was a good length and stating that “…the world they created, both graphically and musically, was fantastic.”
However, as most will recognise, they noted the multiplayer is the game’s focus and said that “…at release it was everything I’d hoped for…”, praising the “…huge land and air battles…” and the “…RTS meets 3rd person shooter mechanics…”. However, things have gone downhill since launch a bit, the main problem being a lack of players. For example, when Dom El played last week it consisted of “…a 2 v 2 team event, which took ten minutes to find a fourth player for.” Hardly an ideal situation is it?
MrJimmy has a solution for Dom El’s problem though, clans. To put it simply he says that if you’re not in a clan “…you are wasting your money.” However, even then he notes that of the twenty five people in his Starhawk clan “…only half a dozen play regularly.” He thinks the biggest problem the game has is that people, perhaps understandably, weren’t willing to wait for the game’s second patch. This update “…has resulted in a more stable and balanced game – nowhere near perfect, but heading in the right direction,” according to MrJimmy, so perhaps it’s worth a revisit.
Finally, whilst not the most reflective of the overall view on the game, I just had to include darthnick’s view on the game, simply for the level of pure positivity. Here’s what they had to say:
This is the best multiplayer game you will ever play, if you like online shooters you will love this!
So with a seemingly indecisive view from the community, how did the game fair in the numerical verdict? Well that was a little indecisive as well to be honest, with three of you selecting Rent It and four rating it as a Buy It. It would seem that, in spite of its flaws, Starhawk is just worth a buy.
As per usual there’s a poll included above, with Dark Souls and Binary Domain taking the place of top choice Starhawk and bottom place Gotham City Impostors.
Bilbo_bobbins
I think its probably worth a buy for those never ventured into Warhawk before.
carson321
to be honest, i never even considered starhawk, used to love warhawk, back in the early days, but i left it for about 6 months, came back to it when i bought a new map pack, but just spent my whole time getting snipped or killed as soon as i started running/hawking into the main part of the map, got bored with it because of that!
cam_manutd
A good game no doubt with the space theme being a natural fit but its not as natural as Warhawk and thus will continue to hold out for a Warhawk 2. 200hrs+ and counting in Warhawk :)
Forrest_01
I was actually about to ask whether we could have Ridge Racer Unbounded as a WeView choice next time, but then i remembered that there are only about 5 people that own it!
My thought was simply that it would be a good way to see who currently has it & get others interested in the title (& maybe the meets?), but as people need to vote for it, it likely wouldn’t come up anyway.
Similarly, it wouldn’t be much of a WeView with only 2 or 3 of us commenting on it!
zb100
Funnily enough, I was thinking of picking up a few copies of Unbounded to pass onto mates this weekend. Still twenty in most retailers, I guess that’s a good sign as it means people are hanging onto copies?
Forrest_01
You can find it pretty regularly online for around £15, but i happen to know that it was £13 on thehut this morning.
OnlineAssassin77
Well my vote on Ridge Racer Unbounded would be AVOID AT ALL COSTS worst 25 quid ive spent the online is an utterly atrociously broken pile of crap very lucky i got 20 pound trade on it PHEW!
Forrest_01
Broken in what way though if you don’t mind me asking?
Granted, i had a bit of trouble joining at first, but if i bypass my router (as is required for some games), its no problem whatsoever
We have even encountered some randoms when we play. Yeah!
Also, did you not bother with the single player at all then?
OnlineAssassin77
Well all the races i played online and in the meets where all over the place and so were the cars when you eventually found a race online that is people and cars appearing dissapearing jumping all over the track then halfway through a race half the meet would dissapear but would still be racing elsewhere as our race carried on id finish 3rd it would say id finnished 1st then change to 2nd. I was complaining about it with R1M and Del an said hopefully it’d get patched but R1M informed me it hadn’t been touched since launch and the single player didn’t blow me away either im afraid i may have given it more of a chance though if my online experience hadn’t been so awful.
Forrest_01
To be honest mate, that sounds more like your connection than the game itself. I can safely say i have not once experienced anything like that in the few weeks we have been running the meets.
It’s always been quite solid. Somewhat deserted of course, but solid. :)
Also, bear in mind that just because a patch hasn’t arrived doesn’t mean that the experience hasn’t changed. I’m not saying the same happened here of course, but Max Payne online was horribly broken one week & then worked just fine the next & there was no patch & no announcement of any fix. It has just been assumed that they made some fixes to the servers their end.
Saying that, i am not sure if it isn’t a peer to peer connection, so you could be the victim of your connection not ‘talking properly’ to the host connection, but again thats more of a net issue than a game issue.
Not knocking your opinion of course (as you are entitled to one), but to me that definitely sounds like more of an ISP issue than an issue with the game itself.
OnlineAssassin77
Yeah it could have been a fault at my end of things i haven’t got super fast broadband i do posses several routers but ive never had problems with any game like i did with RRU and i wasn’t the only one complaining in the games i did manage to play but i still dont think id vote it as a buy even if the problems where caused by my ISP i just think theres better racers out there thats all. ;)
Takyu
Having just bought the game, I’m genuinely interested in finding a clan to play with regularly, even better if it has people from TSA. If MrJimmy reads this, would it be possible to join his clan?
While I agree that Warhawk hooked me more than Starhawk has, I would still maintain it’s a excellent game, despite some of the balancing issues and slightly cheaty skills (the ability to destroy a tank with melee attacks so quickly with the Bruiser skill is preposterous in my opinion).
I also found myself really enjoying the story in single player, despite it’s short length. Nothing ground-breaking, but I thought the characters were interesting and some of the ‘set-pieces’ that were created with the Build and Battle system were really fun!
OnlineAssassin77
Starhawk is no Warhawk…