On this day 14 years ago, the PlayStation 3 exclusive Starhawk was launched, which took us to the distant future and multiplayer matches with flying mechs.
Sometimes certain games are “ahead of their time” but are rejected by audiences before their concepts stick in other games. Such a title is i Starhawka PlayStation 3 exclusive that was first played on this day in 2012.
Starhawk was a third-person shooter, a kind of successor to Warhawk from 2007. However, while that game was exclusively a multiplayer title, Starhawk had a single-player campaign in addition to competitive gameplay.
Starhawk took us to a future where humans have become greedy in mining the so-called Rift energy. Excessive exposure to it turns people into wild mutants, but the game’s protagonist avoids that fate, Emmet Graveswho as a mercenary helps humanity continue to be greedy in mining the Rift.
Starhawk’s campaign set the stage for multiplayer showdowns in the format 16 against 16. Unlike classic shooters, this game featured flying mechs that could be controlled. In that segment, from today’s perspective, it is quite reminiscent of the Titanfall games that followed two years later.
Starhawk garnered solid reviews upon release, but in the environment at the time, it simply failed to establish itself as a popular multiplayer title. The servers for this game are still alive until 2018and then they were shut down without any announcement.