Worst singleplayer I've ever played. Throw away co-op. The mp is fun and unique but very frustrating.
Everything about the singleplayer is worthless, but the worst part is the gameplay itself. Warhawk is a great mp experience and their ridiculous attempt to shoehorn the same structure into a sp without any changes is a disaster. You have to fight waves of dozens and dozens of enemies by yourself, or battle a dozen other Starhawks at once. On the toughest difficulty it's nearly impossible. The singleplayer is only beaten through stupid loopholes or glitching the brain dead AI. The sp is seriously all about finding a corner to hide, confusing the AI, or cheating the next wave from triggering while you slowly gather the rare energy to make new buildings.
The entire system of getting energy slowly from thirty second spawning oil drums makes no sense. (Not to mention the fact that you get energy from magically respawning oil drums and not… the wells that are sitting several feet away.) Why not give players x amount of energy for the level from the start and have some sort of pacing or level design or strategy rather than forcing them to run from the battle, find an oil drum and sit by it for 20 twenty minutes while enemies aimless wait, mysteriously don't spawn or attack a target that can't be destroyed. Gameplay and design wise this is the worst singleplayer I've ever played. It feels like when people used to make terrible levels with the Starcraft editor… except even worse. These people had no clue how to make a singleplayer game.
The same applies to the co-op mode that no one thought to properly scale. Playing by myself I'm batting one hundred percent. Playing with two people I'm probably at 90 percent and that's playing on the hardest difficult. Playing with a full party of four on the easiest difficult I've won maybe fifteen percent of the time. Isn't co-op supposed to be played with friends? Why did they double the amount of enemies and double their health for each player that joins. Did no one realize that makes no sense? Again winning comes down to leaving one enemy alive after each wave and trolling around the battlefield waiting to gather 30 second spawning oil drums. What a stupid system.
But I didn't buy Starhawk for the unnecessary garbage sp or co-op. I bought it because it was the sequel to one of my most beloved PS3 mp games. However adding in the RTS elements is a big switch. It still plays almost exactly like Warhawk but the game is a lot more strategic. In fact it's almost too strategic (and I never thought I would say those words). RTSs are tough to begin with. Throw in third person combat and it's much tougher. Now throw in managing all the RTS elements with 15 other incompetent morons on the internet and it's sheer frustration. Take for example the fact that winning or losing is dependant on setting up an appropriate outpost while guarding your base, something you absolutely cannot do by yourself.
Overall the RTS elements are fun and very unique. You lose some of the zany fun of Warhawk but gain something in return. The real problem is that the RTS elements create such a huge disparity. Either you're working with intelligent people and things are humming along perfectly, or you're getting absolutely obliterated. There's never a close game. You basically feel like you're boosting wins or else rage quitting and that's no fun.
The game does feel a little sloppy. Your interactions with objects are off a lot of the time. You can't shoot around walls properly. Also the game hard crashes your ps3 way too often.
Aside from the tank canon all of the guns in the game have zero weight or impact. It's hard to tell if you're shooting or being shot. It's hard to tell when you're losing health or near death especially in vehicles. The vehicles float around the screen like they're on clouds until you get caught on a random rock that actually possesses physical properties. Also the graphics stink. But, all of these things could have been said of Warhawk and I loved that game. Providing a realistic and visceral combat experience wasn't the point of Warhawk, it was just crazy fun.
I do have to tip my hat to the features they added in. A ranking system that looks at skill rather than just level is brilliant. Also a real clan feature is something every single mp game desperately needs. It's so much fun and requires no effort to add. But then Starhawk fails to have any sort of stat tracking. The sound is actually very good as well.
Unlike BF3 where I was overwhelmed by the great mp and able to forgive the miserable sp, with Starhawk the mp is mediocre and the sp is unforgettably awful. One week later and I'm sick of it. While I like the team, and I want to like this game, and the idea is very interesting with pretty decent execution, overall the game just isn't very good… I'd rather be playing Warhawk.