The gameplay is all solid. It's just limited by lack of content, glitches, and no carrots to keep people playing.
Games like BF and the upcoming CoD4 keep players coming back by offering unlocks for skillful playing, or just sticking with the game long enough. In Warhawk, everything is right there from the get go. There are medals and ribbons to get in multiplayer, but they don't actually do anything. I know the meat and potatoes of a multiplayer game is the actual gameplay, but having carrots in the way of unlocks sure helps seperate the ones with good gameplay from the ones that have good gameplay plus a motivational device. There are more visual customization options as you rank up, but who gives a fuck about that?
Visuals are good, not great. Models and terrain are a bit above XBox level, but what makes the visuals impressive here are the scale of things. You can have up to 32 players on a map, and when you are flying high in a 'hawk, you see everything happening with no slowdown, and that's pretty impressive.
There are a good amount of weapons, land and air. I can't speak on how useful some of them are--some of them seemed questionable, but I only played for like 2 hours today, so my assessment may be wrong.
There are only 5 maps. They have variations but. . .5 maps. They're all really different, and really big. There are 4 different game types, in addition to being able to set certain maps as dogfight (warhawks only, no ground vehicles or on foot stuff); this at least gives you enough modes to get some mileage out of the maps.
If I were to rank this against Shadowrun, I'd have to say they are both about even. They both deliver on gameplay and fumble hard on content. Warhawk might even be more of a letdown since this is exactly the same as the beta. At least the Shadowrun beta didn't give us all the content to spoil us on the full game.
The game is also glitchy. There are lockups and the information the game retrieves when getting server lists sometimes appears a little bit dated.
Game-starved with a PS3 and a decent network connection? You can definitely do worse than this. Just buy the cheaper downloadable package, please.