Within seconds of the starting the Starhawk reveal video I'm blown away. Not just by the game itself, but by how much risk Sony is taking with it. Abandoned is the art style and universe of the Warhawk franchise Starhawk is building on. Instead, Starhawk is going in a decidedly Western direction. On top of that, Sony's giving this PlayStation 3 exclusive title – one the company is hoping to develop into a new franchise – to Lightbox Interactive, an unproven studio based in Austin, Texas. Add to this its unorthodox lead character and its new focus on single player, and the chance for disaster or outright rejection by fans looks about as likely as people digging it as much as I did.

Starhawk is a third-person shooter, set in a universe where humans are exploring and colonizing the stars. Many people, and more specifically miners, are searching for a powerful substance called Rift Energy. You play as Emmet Graves, an ex-miner who's been tainted by Rift Energy but lived to tell the tale. Now he's on a quest to take out an evil group of humans who've been mutated by Rift Energy and collectively refer to themselves as the Outcasts. At his disposal are an array of heavy weapons, structures he can call down from the sky to erect defenses, as well as powerful airships called Hawks.

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Warhawk never had that well-developed of a universe, but it definitely had a style that hinted at influences from the World War II era. Starhawk does away with all of this, though, taking the franchise in a direction that mixes future technology and space travel with a cowboy vibe. The lead character, Emmett Graves, embodies this perfectly. He's dressed like a desperado and looks equally ready to pilot a Hawk as he does to tie down a bull. But along with this, he's got metal parts protruding from his back, technology that keeps him alive despite his encounter with a toxic substance called Rift Energy. It's an odd juxtaposition that looks really good together, but I'm curious how it'll sit with fans of the older games. With the exception of the occasional hit like Red Dead Redemption or Gun, Western titles and cowboys aren't exactly the most popular things nowadays.Graves is also interesting as a character because, in the realm of gaming, he's unique in one major way: he's black. I'm told it wasn't a conscious decision, but Emmett Graves represents a woefully tiny set of black protagonists in games. Add to this his character being tainted by Rift Energy (he survives with careful implants, usually it just mutates you into monsters known as Outcasts), and there's potential for themes about stigma and persecution potentially tossed into Starhawk. Personally, I think that sounds great and I think he's a great looking character, but I'm curious how fans will react when they're placed in the shoes of a minority. Will Graves speak to them? Will they even have the maturity to contemplate this instead of just spewing forth the typical vitriol of an Internet gaming message board?With its new lead character, the next big leap Lightbox Interactive decided to take with Starhawk was to make single player as big a focus as the multiplayer. Unlike the PS3 Warhawk, which was an online multiplayer-only title, Starhawk is attempting to build a franchise with characters and a universe we can fall in love with for years to come. This is Emmett's story, and we're going to play an hours-long campaign that tells about his struggle to help the miners fight off the Outcast threat. The tricky part is going to be making it interesting.The one stage I played put Emmett against waves of attacking Outcasts, and it played a lot like a tower defense game (albeit one with badass Hawks and buildings raining from the sky), but I'm curious how they'll make the campaign interesting in the long run. A bunch of levels that boil down to "kill base X" or "defend position Y" aren't going to make for very compelling scenarios that tell a heartfelt story, yet that seems to be exactly what Lightbox wants to do.Besides a campaign, the hook of Starhawk's gameplay that really sets it apart from what's come before in the series is its "Build and Battle" design. This silly slogan betrays what's actually a pretty ambitious idea, though – namely letting players build structures almost anywhere on the battlefield. Both multiplayer and single player allow players to call down structures from the sky, granting them access to everything from turrets to walls to depots that can deploy jeeps and Hawks. The battlefield is yours to manipulate and shape, and the hope is that this will radically alter the way each level is played. Say, for instance, I create a choke point with my resources, while you play the same level and just focus on building vehicles depots. In the end, we'll probably both beat the level, but our experiences will have been pretty different, suiting our individual styles of play.The danger in this is how to handle building in multiplayer. When I played a few matches of capture the flag, each side was only allowed to build 16 structures. It sounds like a lot, but when there's no ability to recall or demolish a structure you no longer need, you can run into problems. On one level, we didn't even have any Hawk depots, leaving us unable to executefast aerial assaults. I'm told that this is something they're working on, but it's a complicated problem to overcome. Allowing anyone on the team to demolish buildings could mean a player could just blow up structures to be a jerk, but clearly the current system doesn't work either. It's tough to say how this system will ultimately function, but it's a potentially volatile situation when you're putting so much power in the hands of a team of uncoordinated online players.I might sound down on Starhawk, but I assure you I'm not – it looks really cool for how early in development it is. Not all the decisions the developers made seem risky, either, such as the ability for the titular Hawks to transform between being jets and mechs. Yup, the Hawks are now akin to Transformers, and it isn't uncommon to see players soar through the air, transform midway, and come crashing onto the ground guns blazing.Several parts of Starhawk are points of possible contention or significant design challenges, but after playing it and participating in the reveal event I'm a believer. Lightbox Interactive may not have shipped a game as a team, but it's composed of people who've worked on Twisted Metal, War of the Monsters and the last Warhawk title. More than that, the studio is bold, passionate and not afraid to try something that could bite them in the ass. They say everything's bigger in Texas, and apparently that applies to ambition, too.