have to admit to a degree of skepticism about Warhawk prior to playing the final version. Its debut more than a year ago was all about the motion-controlled flight, which frankly didn’t amaze me. Then came the announcement that the game would be a purely multiplayer experience. Within my mind, there was much hissing and booing. Then I started seeing screenshots of the final game, and the graphical quality on display certainly wasn’t what I was expecting out of the PlayStation 3.

So it was with a great deal of surprise that I found myself loving Warhawk within moments of playing my first giant online multiplayer match. At the center of the game’s success is a willingness to focus in on an idea and get it totally right. My complaints above stand, but the lack of cutting edge graphics and a cool single-player story are in service to the game’s primary goal – providing multiplayer fun with unprecedented excitement and destruction while simultaneously delivering great controls and the flexibility to play the way you want to.

Let’s talk for a moment about game balance, and how hard it must be to achieve in a multiplayer game like this. You’ve got people on foot, with all sorts of insane weaponry. You’ve got people zooming by in artillery-mounted jeeps. Added to the fray is a regular smattering of explosively charged tanks. And flipping and firing through the air are these massive VTOL style jets. In every way imaginable, Warhawk strikes a nearly perfect balance between each of these disparate groups. Wherever you are on the field of battle, you have a role you can play, and almost all of the on-foot and vehicular options are valid at any time. In other words, you can play the game any number of different ways and still be successful.

Of those numerous ways to play, many players will marvel most at the game’s namesake machines – the flying warhawks make for one of the best flight experiences you’ve had in a game, particularly one that also includes ground-based combat. Whether you use the motion-control scheme or not (not is surprisingly the default), these strange hovering death machines handle like a dream. With a quick button press, players can switch between a slowly hovering state to a blazingly fast jet, complete with trick moves on the right analog. Large scale midair dogfights are as good as they’ve ever been on a console game, and just the flight combat game types are enough to keep people happy for hours.

Few of the other game variations are a huge surprise, but everything from simple deathmatches to capture-the-flag competitions are fun and functional. Several gigantic maps serve as the setting for your matches. While there are only a few of these, you’ll constantly be playing battles out in different areas of these huge land masses, so that you won’t bore quickly of those same tired layouts.

At its best, Warhawk delivers constant thrills through exciting team-based action that’ll have you coming back for more if only to rank up to the next level in your leaderboard standings. At its worst, Warhawk will disappoint because you’ll never really get a good context or sense of the world around you, since there really aren’t any plot or characters to deliver those elements. For those who could care less about such nuances in their games, Warhawk makes for some positvely explosive firefights.