Hawken.

Did you know I was actually going to move to Wordpress tonight? Well fuck that! Happy New Year folks!

I'm going to say in advanced, I've played only a few hours of this and only levelled myself up a few levels too, I did this deliberately because Hawken is still in open beta and I wanted this to be less of a full review and more my first reactions.

I'm not a big mech fan so I don't really know how much is true in the statement I've heard in people saying 'Hawken is the mech game, mech fans have been waiting for' but I can tell you I was pretty disappointed with the whole thing.

One of the goals of the developers was to really capture how it'd feel to pilot a mech in warfare - well theoretically of course, as mechs like this aren't real yet, sadly. And I think they've done a pretty good job...but perhaps not in the way they probably intended. The mechs feel exactly like what they are, giant, heavy hulks of metal and although the controls themselves are tight, being in its very essence a mech that you are piloting there are times when it all feels very clunky and unresponsive. As many battles can be quite frantic, grace is something mechs don't have, so trying to twirl your war beast around like a ballerina to take on the opponents coming at all sides is basically hopeless. Sort of like Call of Duty only everyone is severely overweight and has jetpacks on. And yes, I know they've put in bursts, dashes and other such things to get around this but each one of these depletes your fuel, which depletes hella quickly. This is less of an issue in team based games, where most of the focus lies thankfully but don't even bother with the free for all modes unless you want a heap of frustration.

However I can't say this entirely negatively, either. Setting it in the cockpit is a stroke of genius when it comes to general immersion. The guns will glow as they begin to overheat, the various important areas of the cockpit will flash and change and move, you can hear as well as feel as each leg crashes to earth as the engines roar to make the thing move - about the only thing the game lacks is a pair of hands flicking switches and shifting joysticks.

Overall though for me at least, Hawken didn't really click. For all of my frustrations and complaints with Blur, if I didn't get to hurl my car crazily around the corner, grind off all the paint on the wall before attacking an opponent and driving through them as they turn into a fireball, a lot of the fun would be lost. Hawken tries to suggest a sense of running and gunning fun, a sort of Blur with legs, but even before the fuel gauge runs out it never reaches the same sense of thrill. Plus, when you take that all away, despite a nice detailed cockpit there actually really isn't a whole lot to set Hawken out, there really isn't a lot that makes Hawken feel any different to other shooters, ironically. You think being in a giant robot and fighting other giant robots would give a drastically different kind of shooter experience, for whatever reason...it doesn't.

The maps don't really help much either. I guess to save on costs most of the maps were pretty small, especially considering you're piloting an almost building sized mech and even on 3 vs 3 games, I was practically getting shot at every time I went around a building which was pretty annoying when I was trying to get my bearings in my first few games. But some people learn best when being thrown in the deep end, I suppose.

The game has been in free to play open beta mode for only just over two weeks now I guess because it's free. But you don't have to worry about not finding a game, there are loads of players, which in itself causes problems. Like many shooters and many free to play titles there are both elements of pay to win and the whole, well that guy is five levels ahead of me, I have no chance. Most games I was in, people were at least twenty levels ahead of me and about my only option to actually score any points was to play dirty and try and attack people who were defenseless while healing. I don't know why more shooters don't filter this stuff, I know the level twenty fives love stomping on the little guy but isn't it more important new players feel welcome? I mean unlike some shooters, the mechs can actually take hits and you can repair yourself so you're unlikely to finish a match without at least a few assists but it's still just as frustrating, I want to play people of my own skill level, who haven't bought all the best stuff to win and I don't see why this isn't an obvious option to include as standard. Luckily you level up every couple of matches, even if you mainly got assists, so it isn't quite as frustrating as it would probably, initially, seem.

Despite this Team Deathmatch is probably my favourite mode. There are two unique game modes, Missile Silo and Siege which are the modes everyone raves about but I didn't really enjoy either of them, the game is much too frantic to really get a grasp on your objectives but team deathmatch really suits the frantic style of play, the action is nonstop and there is a real sense of teamwork. The game really is at its most satisfying as you and your team roll around the corner, catch an enemy off guard and absolutely pummel them with all you've got.

However the gameplay is still best described as arduous. You don't really think about how basic a first person shooter is when playing it, that it's really just a race to see who can hit the other person with the required amount of bullets first but that is because of how the game is constructed. The fact the mechs can take a beating and they can heal mid-game, along with ammo being replaced by an overheating mechanic, it just makes the basic nature of the gameplay that more obvious. When you battle an enemy, it's ultimately feels less of a battle and more of a frustrating race to see who can destroy who and who can dish out the most amount of damage before overheating. And despite there being classes which I'll get too next in the review, there really isn't much strategy in this. Unless you've got a great mouse and a particularly fast mech so you can dodge, really the person with the biggest mech will always win because being the mech with the most health and the most damage means you can survive longer and deal out more damage before overheating meaning a lot of the illusion really starts to deflate from the whole thing.

Mechs come in three types, light, heavy and the all rounder and the mech customisation is incredibly deep, this game has some heavy RPG elements but most of these can only be accessed if you're willing to pay or level grind, two things I'm not willing to do in an open beta so I didn't really have a chance to really explore any of this, but if you're a guy who likes some RPG flavour with their shooting and has a lot of time or some cash to burn, you'll be hella satisfied by what you find here. 

In terms of overall fairness of the charges, you're taxed on your in game real world purchases meaning the smallest amount you can spend is £6 for DLC. But for six quid you can get a whole new mech with credits spare. The problem is there aren't enough credits spare to really do anything with, so about £2 of your credits will basically be sat there doing nothing, so it isn't steep in itself but stupidly put together in an obvious ploy to make you spend more money. In terms of points for levelling up, as always with free to play games that need your money to support them, you get very few points as you level up, so if you want to unlock stuff without paying anything, you're gonna have to put a huge amount of time into the game.

What they did have on offer were some mechs to trial, to get a sense of the different classes. The Grenadier was one of the ones on trial and I hated it. It suffers the same problem every grenade launcher class does on shooters. Grenade launchers, for all their effectiveness in real life, are oddly useless in fps games. You couple their short range with generally how easy they are to avoid, I was doing fuck all with this mech. Occasionally if I got myself in the right spot I might be able to land a few kills on enemies distracted by my team but overall I found myself much happier with the base mech you start with.

The other mech on trial, the sharpshooter, I got on with that one way better. It had slightly less health but it moved faster and the long range rifle was absolutely awesome complete with a weapon that could hold its own in close combat too.

So do I recommend it? I've already realised I'm a shit gamer and gone beyond the point of caring but I think there is only one thing that decides whether you'll enjoy an online FPS and that is the question, are you good at it? People may say winning doesn't matter but I personally find that bullshit, people just trying to look good. Winning is absolutely everything, it is one of the few things that really matter in life, especially in gaming, these games are no fun if you spend most of the match dying. I come consistently near or at the top of both Killing Floor and Team Fortress 2 games, so I know they are the games for me. Hawken however clearly isn't. Over my rough six hour test play the only thing I could keep consistent was to be in the top three awards for most deaths. Hawken is free to play, so there really is no reason not to give it a try but I'm sorry, I just don't think Hawken will be for me.

Think About It!

-Locke