The upcoming Starhawk is an interesting concept for a game. It takes a lot of elements from the real-time strategy (RTS) genre, and melds them with vehicle-heavy third-person combat. Does this formula actually work as well in practice as it sounds in theory? I recently got my hands on the game to find out for myself, spending some time with the classic capture-the-flag mode.

As soon as I started playing Starhawk, I realized that it was not the standard third-person shooter I'd become so accustomed to. Instead of spawning on the map, I had to drop in from space inside of a tiny little pod. On the way down, I could make tiny adjustments to my trajectory.

While this may seem like just a weird little quirk, it actually has some strategic value. Since you are asked to plot your drop location on an overhead map, you get to choose where you enter the battle. (You can only land inside your own spawn area, though, so don't expect to drop right next to the enemy's flag.) And even better, if your pod lands on top of an enemy player, you'll score an easy kill. Every time you are killed, you will re-enter the battle via pod.

Another interesting feature of Starhawk is that you have the ability to call down various types of buildings and place them just about anywhere you see fit. Once you select a location, the desired structure will drop in from space. Just like your landing pod, these buildings will kill any players unfortunate enough to be standing underneath when they hit the ground. This does bring up some interesting combat scenarios, as dropping an entire building on top of an enemy soldier is an incredibly satisfying way to score a kill. However, you have to be careful, since you can be crushed beneath your own structures.

Among the buildings you can choose from are sniper towers, auto-turrets, and garages. The buildings I got the most use out of were the auto-turrets (which I would set up near my team's flag for defense) and the garages (which spawn jeeps.) The jeeps are a bit reminiscent of the Warthogs from Halo, with a driver's seat, a passenger's seat, and a rear mounted gun. (If you hop into the wrong seat, you can switch places easily enough.) They are extremely fun to ride around in, and are actually quite practical in capture-the-flag matches. It's a lot quicker to drive the enemy flag home in a jeep than it is to do it on foot. However, it's best to have a friend on the mounted gun to get rid of any pursuers.

After scoring enough points, the option opens up to build a different type of garage that lets you spawn Warhawks. Once spawned, these can be piloted by either team, and I learned quickly that it was a bad idea to build a Warhawk garage deep in enemy territory.

There were a few strange little quirks I noticed during my play session. First of all, driving a jeep over an enemy player will kill that player, yet it will cause the jeep to slow down much more than it should. In fact, you'll almost come to a dead stop when running over an enemy. Overall it just makes your vehicle feel a lot less powerful, which is a shame, because just about every other aspect of the game makes your character feel incredibly powerful. The very way you burst out of your pod once you land has its own intensity to it. The jeep slowdown just ruins the illusion.

I also found some places where I could get my jeep stuck, even though it didn't make that much sense. In fact, I once found my jeep stuck right inside the garage it spawned inside of. There wasn't even anything blocking the door, I just inexplicably couldn't drive it out.

But these flaws were certainly not major, and my time with the game was a fairly smooth experience. Starhawk still has quite a bit of time before release, and hopefully these tiny kinks will be worked out before it launches next year.

Starhawk is definitely an intense third-person shooter. The RTS/tower defense-type structure-building aspect gives it a deeper level of strategy. Replaying the same map over and over doesn't get stale very quickly, since the building option makes for drastically different obstacles to deal with every time you play a map. I'm personally quite excited to get my hands on the full game.

By Josh Wirtanen
CCC Editor/Contributing Writer