WarHawk Interview: Dylan Jobe

Detailed, hands-on update and interview with Dylan Jobe, who has had a haircut since last year's E3.

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There's also full support for clans in WarHawk, meaning you can set it up so you never have to play without someone you know. You'll be able to track how the other people in your clan are doing and also pass messages with them. Bragging rights come courtesy of the leaderboards showing just how everyone else is doing.

WarHawk offers the standard statistics offered by other multiplayer-focussed games, but there are some others too. In addition to keeping track of simple stuff like kill-to-death ratio, best weapon, best level, and others like that, Jobe says the game offers a few specialized stats too, showing you how far you've flown, how many people you've run over, who you've killed most often and, more importantly, who's killing you the most - "so you can go and get revenge!"

Initially, however, the person killing you the most could be you. Flying the WarHawk is relatively straightforward but it does take some getting used to. You fly the plane with the left stick and do loops and rolls with the right stick. The R1 button is for the machine guns and L1 is for secondary weapons, such as missiles, which you select with the D-pad.

"Sometimes, we see players crash," says Jobe, "and it's actually something we spent a lot of time trying to make as forgiving as possible, because we didn't want it to be like a sim, where it's like fly, fly, fly - oh, you clipped a tree, you're dead. That's not fun."

P L E A S E   V I S I T   O U R   S P O N S O R :

Just like in the original game on PlayStation, the WarHawk can hover too. You can put the plane's wings up by pressing Triangle to get into flight mode; R2 is the gas, and double tapping R2 sets the afterburner in. You can even powerslide by hitting the gas and the brake at the same time.

The motion of the craft in the air and the fluidity with which you move around and pull off flashy aerobatics is exciting to watch and gripping to take control of and play. Aiming, locking on and shooting down enemies takes some getting used to at first. After a while, the range of attack options and different secondary weapons should hopefully become second nature.

You're not always confined to the cockpit, though, as a surprising amount of the action in WarHawk takes place on foot. The motion controls that were shown at E3 are still in the game. You'll be able to fly planes and drive tanks and other ground vehicles using the tilt controls, but for the on-foot sections, it's the controller only.

If it all sounds a bit complicated, don't worry. Incognito is aiming to make this a game beginners will be able to pick up and play. "When you first get on your machine, you'll be playing in arcade mode, and it will be like riding a bicycle with training wheels," explains Jobe.

"The game does a lot of stuff for you - it maintains the horizon line, you can do a loop with the right stick and it does it very easily for you - manoeuvers that will help you add agility to your aircraft and help you to escape missiles."

With so much work going into the mechanics of the game, it seems a shame that we won't get to play the story-focussed parts of the game. Or will we?

"Maybe! We'll see." says Jobe."If consumers want it, we'll definitely do it. Our key decision to make that change, was we wanted to make it good for players."

"The other thing is, I am a firm believer that players should get a great game, out of the box, as it were. I don't like games that have Trojan horse content, where it's like, you've downloaded this game but for 95 cents more you can unlock the square button. That's a bunch of BS. What you download from the store, that's the game. And if players want us to expand it, we'll expand it, but we're not Trojan horsing content."

WarHawk is coming exclusively to the PlayStation 3 this summer.

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