Hawken
It sometimes feels like Hawken’s been around forever — the launch trailer came out just over two years ago — but as the newest IP on the block, Adhesive Games’s robot smasher technically holds the challenger position.
That’s hardly a disadvantage. Hollywood’s already locked up the movie rights, awards and accolades have sailed in en masse, and an enthusiastic beta community enabled Adhesive to grow from 11 to 30 employees in just the last year. On the downside, a few business opportunities fizzled — a major deal with game-streaming company Gaikai fell through when Sony bought them out — and, according to producer Jason Hughes, a final launch date is still hazy (though it’s projected to happen before September).
“Matchmaking and the new-user experience isn’t where it needs to be,” says Hughes. “The party system is coming soon.” But player feedback and a rapid response on Adhesive’s end strongly suggests that when Hawken does finally go gold, it’ll shine.
And it’s pretty slick already. If Mechwarrior is the strategic tank simulator, Hawken is the cherry-red Ferrari with guns and tow missiles bolted to its sides. Its mechs practically fly around around the maps, and that’s before you hit the jump jets. “I’d consider it in the first-person shooter genre,” says Hughes. “There is a little bit of a chess match when it comes to fighting your opponents. We want the weight and the customization, but there’s some speed to it.”
While Hawken does include those things, neither the weight nor the customization comes close to Mechwarrior’s level of granularity. Like their competition, Adhesive Games drops a new mech roughly every four weeks, but Hawken’s bots each come with their own special abilities. Put that together with unlockable skill trees and you have a light class system. One recent addition qualifies as a engineer/medic-style support mech that can repair teammates on the fly and drop walls for instant cover.
For-purchase mechs like this one run you about $5. Going in for new (though not unbalanced) equipment, boosters, and custom parts can shoot the price tag into low orbit, particularly if you’re outfitting multiple mechs. That said, with patience and persistence (ranging from dozens to hundreds of hours), you can buy everything with in-game currency instead and Hawken actually issues you one of its best machines — the C-RT Recruit — as your starter mech.
It doesn’t come with training wheels.
That’s the big reward … loading up and trusting to your speed and reflexes. Hawken gives you those tools in abundance, and then it lets you earn even more.
It also offers compatibility with the Ocular Rift virtual-reality headset and one of the more interesting modes in either game’s beta so far. Siege sets two teams racing to collect energy from a stationary dispenser and deliver it to their massive aerial battleship. Once it’s gassed up, that battleship launches, slowly flies overhead, and bombards the opposing base until it’s shot down or victory is achieved. Both teams can field their battleships at once, but only one can control the center-map anti-aircraft gun essential to halting enemy progress. That means each map holds not one, but two simultaneous points of contention. It gets hectic. Fast.
And “fast” sums Hawken up pretty well. It’s all about diving in, getting shot up, pulling back for a self-repair cycle, then jumping right back into the fire. Mechwarrior would never be so forgiving. Or as frenetic.
But if that sounds like an arcade-like approach, you need a look at Heavy Gear Assault.