When the Weekend Meant Warhawk
An honest week's work, a PS3 waiting at home, and the strange comfort of shouting tactics at strangers from another continent
There was a stretch of my life where the whole week seemed to lean toward Friday afternoon.
I was in that stretch between finishing work for the day and starting university again. Early starts, steel toe boots, lunch wrapped in foil and the day carved up by shift patterns instead of lecture timetables.
Earning my own money gave the week a “shape” it hadn’t had before, and because the week had shape, the weekend actually meant something. By Thursday I was already counting down, already visualizing the battles ahead of me.
I’d get in, drop my bag, eat something standing up, and put the PS3 on. That orchestral chime did the work of clearing my head. Deep breath in, then out. Then Warhawk.
For a few hours I’d be somewhere else entirely.
I was never really an online gamer, spending most of my time dabbling. I was a single player gamer. Resistance, Uncharted and Killzone 2. But Warhawk was the exception, and looking back I think it’s because the game was built entirely around other people.
You see, Warhawk was a game with no single player at all. Well, unless you count some mostly overlooked training missions.
Sony and Incognito Studios cut it before release and leaned all the way into multiplayer instead, with up to 32 people across five maps, each with several layouts, fighting over Zone control points or racing for the flag.
It was a bold decision. But was it the right decision? I think so. It meant everything about the game, right down to the way maps were built, existed to make other people worth finding. A sense of scale and genuine delight as you made your way towards an unsuspecting enemy.
The vehicles were definitely the spine of the experience. Jeeps got squads to a contested base before it flipped to the other team and tanks held ground. But tanks were exposed the second they drifted off on their own, making them easy pickings for a Warhawk with a lock-on.
And the Warhawk itself, the aircraft the whole game is named for, took actual practice. You could fly it with the SIXAXIS motion controls if you wanted, tilting the pad like a control yoke, or you could use regular dual sticks which I imagine most did.
Either way, the first few dogfights usually ended with you upside down in a canyon wall. But once it clicked, nothing else on the PS3 felt like it. Nothing for me has felt like it since.
None of it needed spelling out either. There was never any doubt about what you or your team needed to do next. The UI stayed out of the way while simultaneously telling you everything, which mattered given how chaotic things could get.
Some people never left the pilot's seat, and some never got out of a tank, and some sat on a turret defending a base for an entire match. The game ran on genuine teamwork, not solo glory.
But what actually stuck with me wasn’t the mechanics. It was how vocal everyone was. Most of the people I played with were in the US, so my Friday evening was their Friday afternoon, and somebody would drop off mid-match to make coffee or take the dog out.
I got to know people. Something about the American way of life grew on me, enough to always want to visit, never enough to want to live there like a lot of my friends did.
In between flying and dying we talked about work, football, baseball, family, whatever was going on that week. We were still properly competitive, don't get me wrong, but it became less like a match and more like a standing appointment with people who just become friends.
It's one thing to have an idea of what Americans, or any nationality, are like from a distance. It's another after you've lost to the same three of them every Friday for a year and heard them moan about their commute like anyone else would.
We weren't representing anywhere except the Eucadian Republic or the Chernovan Empire, whichever avatar we'd landed on, just a bunch of dudes who'd found a game that became our third place.
We were separated by the Atlantic, but united in wanting the same thing, a decent life, for ourselves and for the people we cared about. That, and kicking ass in Warhawk.
Most online games come and go in a few months, but Warhawk held on for us until Modern Warfare 2 arrived and pulled the group elsewhere.
Before that though, there was always Friday, finishing a shift, knowing that in an hour I'd hear "there he is" through a headset from someone six time zones away.
Three simple words that meant the weekend was mine, and that I was about to hand large chunks of it over to a bunch of Yanks who thought tea was inferior to coffee.
Well, no one is perfect. 🫖