14 DAY TRIAL // HAWKEN is a mech-powered multiplayer first-person shooter created by Adhesive Games and published by Meteor Entertainment and we have been lucky enough to get into the beta phase of the game and take a look at the gameplay it offers before the official early December launch date.
The game is seen as a sort of spiritual successor to the MechWarrior series and it takes just a few minutes of play time to appreciate how well the development team captured the feeling of being enclosed within a weighty war beast.
The mechs have power to them and dwarf the surrounding landscape and battles feel important and weighty, with heat management as important to success as careful shot placing.
The maps included so far are also interesting, mixing outdoor areas and urban landscapes that force players to tweak tactics in order to surprise enemies and ensure their own survivability.
Much of HAWKEN’s success will depend on how varied the mechs offered in the final version are and how well the entire experience is balanced.
Already there are some troubling signs that some traditional first-person shooter mechanics are creeping into the game; the sight of bunny-hopping mechs on the battlefield is the most worrying one as I would prefer a more cerebral and tactics driven experience.
The beta phase also offers players a chance to simply go into training modes in order to get some basic idea of how to play the game and train for the competitive side.
HAWKEN will be offered using a free-to-play business model.
The biggest problem with HAWKEN is that the beta client refused to run properly on one of the machines we tried it on, crashing to desktop without any warning soon after we entered an actual match.
The problem was not present on another machine, but it’s still not clear what causes it.
Worth a full Softpedia review? Yes.