A sequel to Hawken was certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPS shut down on PC, now requiring a fan-made fix even just to play offline against bots, I didn't expect to ever again dash around its cool sci-fi cityscapes as a charmingly scrappy little stomper. So I was excited when publishers 505 Games announced singleplayer follow-up Hawken Reborn on Monday then launched it into early access two days later. Having now played it, oh dear. You know, it's okay for the dead to stay dead.
]]>Five years after competitive multiplayer mech shooter Hawken shut down, a new game will invite us back to stomp around in its scrappy mechs. Announced last night by developers and publishers 505 Games, the free-to-play Hawken Reborn will launch into early access tomorrow. This time, it's a PvE game, with story missions plus open patrol zones to explore and complete jobs. I was enamoured with the jetdashing scrappy mechs and greeble-covered apartment blocks of the first game but always wished it had a singleplayer or co-op campaign, so I'm certainly curious about this.
]]>Free-to-play mech 'em up Hawken shut down its PC servers in early 2018. Alas, even the solo modes were lost to PC players as well when it was removed from Steam. Hawken didn't have the most inspiring run on PC. It spent five years in early access, changed developers multiple times, and wound up with uninspiring concurrent player counts for a multiplayer game. Still there are some fans who aren't willing to let the mechs stay dormant. They've managed to get a couple singleplayer game modes working again.
]]>Free-to-play mech shooter Hawken [official site] is shutting down on PC, the developers announced today. While console versions will continue, the PC servers will shut down on January 2nd, 2018. After five years, it still hasn't left early access. Hawken has struggled in recent years, passing through several developers and seeing peak concurrent player counts fell to below 200. But heck, it does have some beautiful futurecities covered in grime and greebles, doesn't it?
]]>A group of folks who worked on ill-fated mech FPS Hawken have formed a new studio and announced their first game, a multiplayer FPS which sounds a bit like Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege. They describe Burstfire [official site] - which won't be free-to-play - as a "slow paced" 5v5 tactical shooter where one team's fortifying and defending a position and the other must crack it (with the help of explosives, obvs).
Unfortunately Hawken's oh-so-pretty futuretrash look is left far behind, and Burstfire appears to be about surly men running around houses and places with wooden crates.
]]>Hawken [official site] was clearly in trouble. Bugs had gone unfixed, patches ceased to flow, its forums went down, and developers Adhesive Games remained silent. Yep, it was in a pickle all right. But huzzah, things are looking up for the free-to-play multiplayer mech FPS.
Reloaded Games, the company who took over APB after creators Realtime Worlds closed, have announced they now own Hawken and are planning a new fixes and updates.
]]>Wasim Salman writes about videogames using short, mechanical sentences. We asked him to do that for us with an article on a suitable subject: the evolution and development of mech games.
Stomp.
In 1997, I bought MechWarrior 2 for the Playstation.
It received a lot of hype a few years earlier on its initial PC release.
MechWarrior 2 was sluggish and barren on console, its mechanics were opaque.
Having no understanding of what either simulation or mech games were, I tried to play MW2 like an action game.
I never made it very far.
]]>Hawken is one of the most attractive games I've ever seen, all shuddering steel and clouds of debris, and it is exclusively about large robots fighting. There's no cutscene-laden narrative, no downtime and no pricetag. There are maybe six people in the world who don't like to see mechs fighting twenty four hours a day so Hawken should be the most popular game in the world. That's not the case though and, ahead of its full launch, publishers Meteor are moving their multiplayer bot-battler to Steam. Current account-holders will receive codes by the end of this week, allowing them to reinstall through Steam without losing their progress and items. Once the migration has occurred the game will become publicly available, some time later this month.
]]>Now that I've written that headline, I actually really want a Christmas special in which giant robots grapple with issues of strained family ties, unconditional kindness despite all that, and ultimately, the merciless slaughter of the entire human race. Who wouldn't be able to identify with that? In the meantime, however, I'll just have to settle for Hawken's Operation Frostburn, which buries the grimy, gloomy mech shooter under colorful mountains of Christmas cheer. Details and video of the corresponding "Wreckage" update below.
]]>Hawken still hasn't added any hawks, which is weird to me, but hope remains given that updates keep on chugging along. The latest, titled Invasion, is quite a doozy, with some oft-requested features leading the charge. Most prominently, the free-to-play first-person blast-o-stomper now has nefarious AI bots, who strut their boxy, boxy bodies in both wave-based co-op and offline training modes. There is also a new mech, because of course there is a new mech. The Predator is lithe, canny, and a friend to the animals, but you probably won't notice its sleek form on the battlefield. It can turn invisible, you see. And now you don't. See what I did there? See? Go below to end this trainwreck of a joke.
]]>I have a mild form of social anxiety that manifests itself in a very specific way: I don't like arriving to parties or events after a lot of people have already turned up. I'd much rather arrive with friends. It's just one of the many ways I'm like a giant killertronic death-bot from the future, because the recent Hawken update has dropped in a party mode. It allows a borg of mechs to join multiplayer servers together, ensuring everyone arrives as a group and that no-one is left out. Sounds wonderful to me. Other additions include a new map, a new mech, and offline team deathmatch.
]]>I love stories with happy endings. And uplifting middles. And only sorta upsetting beginnings. This is the rare tale that both rides that grin-coaxing emotional rollercoaster and focuses on issues of gender inequality in the gaming industry. A rarity? You don't even know the half of it - mostly because I haven't told you about any of it yet (jeez, hold your horses). But in short, Hawken publisher Meteor - whose executive branch is apparently half female - had a minor kerfuffle involving a monolithic poster of a scantily clad, Rosie-The-Riveter-esque character smack dab in the middle of its offices. So a few employees played a prank involving an equally nonsensically dressed male technician, and the results were, well... just delightful.
]]>Look at them! So lovely. Fluttering their big eyes in my direction. I would kiss them all. Failing that, I will blast the sparking guts out of robots on them. Same thing, really. Hawken's latest map is called Facility, which seems like a very pretty name for a really outstandingly handsome death-arena. Sigh. Such beauty. Harvesting floating rock minerals like a Greek god. Mmm.
This latest update also includes a bunch of minor changes, which can only add to Hawken's eligibility on the dating circuit.
]]>I've rather been enjoying my games of Hawken. It's very much a deathmatch arena game of old, only spangled up with its own roboty game modes and lovely visuals. The next update looks promising, too, bringing us a lovely-looking new map called Front Line, as well as a new robot. Said robot is the first genuine support mech in the game, and it's called The Technician. It's a medic, yes, but also it enables heat management of other robots, as well as doing shooty stuff - making it a support-bot with some offensive capabilities of its own. If this were a traditional deathmatch game I'd be looking forward to those first few games after the patch where everyone is playing as the technician and they're all unable to kill each other. As it is, folks will have to shell out real world cash or grind-gathered resources for this chap, so they won't be ubiquitous post-patch.
]]>Hawken is a multiplayer F2P robot combat game in open beta. Jim Rossignol is a handsome, if slightly soft, games journalist. Together, they are words about a game on a blog, please.
Finally I managed to get some time alone with Hawken. We seemed like we were meant for each other: me a hardened dork with a history of multiplayer enthusiasms and robo-infatuations, him a speedy battle mech multiplayer combat game. We'd have so much in common.
Love at first fight?
]]>Handsome Hawken is ever more handsome - or at least that's the intention - thanks to implementation of Nvidia's PhysX tech. The new trailer (Below) shows how PhysX improves particles and debris in the world, creating effect that is partly awesome and partly, well, gaudy. I get that this stuff is super clever, mathematically speaking, but some of the particle effects just seem over the top to me. I suppose that's the point, because it makes it stand out, but I suspect that this kind of stuff will only really sit comfortably when it's used in a more subtle way.
Anyway, take a look.
]]>Hawken's evolution from jaw-dropping, I-can't-believe-it's-not-triple-A indie to investor-powered multimedia behemoth has been utterly fascinating. At the end of the day, though, it's a game about robots rocking, socking, and shooting other robots. The glitz and glamour just won't stick if the core's a prime candidate for the scrap heap. So then, how does Hawken's surprisingly high-speed mech warring fare? I fired up RPS' patented Judge-O-Tron (it is maybe a washing machine with a very mean face drawn on it) and took aim at Hawken's open beta.
]]>It's cold outside. Holiday vacation hasn't started yet. The world might end soon. These are all equally pressing issues, but fortunately, I think I've got a solution that wraps them up in a nice, holiday-friendly bow: giant robots. Think about it: they're naturally warm, have no concept of "work," and will probably be the reason our race of overly argumentative organ pods goes extinct anyway. Win-win-win. Also, Hawken just went into open beta. It's really great, so it'll probably help you feel better about the sorry state of your life and stuff. But mainly those other things.
]]>HAWKEN is about to go into open beta. The F2P mech shooter is embracing the last time the date will look really cool for another thousand years, and opening itself up to the masses on the 12th of the 12th of the 2012th. And this screenshot here? That's ours. OURS! The other rubbish sites don't have it. You can have a bigger version if you click on it.
]]>We sent Brendan to the Hawken press event in London, and there he caught up with Mark Long, boss at Meteor, the company responsible for publishing the F2P mech combat game. From there it was a journey into alternative business models, transmedia experiments, live-action mech-movies, rivalry between mech games, and the appeal of adult diapers.
]]>Hello, you. The Hawken beta gets into full swing today, and I think you might want a key, because it's looking rather good. Fortunately for us, Meteor have provided an RPS "superkey" with ten thousand uses. That means the first ten thousand of you to enter it into the Hawken site will get your eager paws on the controls of a robot today. Get going!
The key, instructions, and a trailer, are below.
]]>"Do we have keys for that?" "Dunno."
Games journalism IN ACTION. This was our response to news that much anticipated F2PFPSMechMMO Hawken is to squeeze in a second round of closed beta in a mere three days time, ahead of an open beta in mid-December. We'd, uh, better try and get ourselves on that. TO THE SENDING AN EMAIL CAVE!
]]>With the Hawken closed beta kicking off this weekend, Adhesive have put out a couple of videos explaining the basics of their jet-packin' robo-combat for beginners, which I suppose will be all of us. They show some tips about the garage, where robots are armed, tweaked, and deployed to the battlfield. Then there's some explanation of how to not to die too horribly once you're out there. All that means plenty of game footage, as you'd expect.
We'll be giving away keys for a later round of the beta really soon, so keep an eye out for that.
]]>Jump-jets and chainguns are going to be tested to their limit between October 26th-29th as Hawken throws itself into the oily maelstrom of closed beta testing. The sign-up thingum is here. At some point thereafter there will be an open beta, I believe, before the game of robot-combat becomes a fully-fledged free-to-play affair. If you need reasons to be excited about all this then I'd recommend having a read of Adam's Hands On experience with the game, and watching this game footage.
Entirely unrelated Daft Punk track posted below.
]]>Hawken is one of those things I get visibly excited about when I describe it to people. I flail and gesture wildly such that no glass of water or small, desk-adorning cactus within a 100 meter radius is safe. Somewhat coincidentally, that's almost exactly what happens when I teleport my brain into Palmer Luckey's mad virtual reality fantasy realm with Oculus Rift - only, you know, for entirely different yet equally devastating reasons. So I suppose it only makes sense that the two literal home-wreckers would end up walking down the aisle hand-in-hand.
]]>If anyone was keeping count, they'd probably tell you that I died a lot more often than I killed at Gamescom. Whether having my head knocked off by a hammer or huddling around a fire and failing to survive the Eastern Front, I spent a lot of time meeting makers. Let it be known, however, that I was actually quite good at Hawken, but that's not the only reason I'm an admirer of the multiplayer deathmech delight.
]]>Ah yes, escalation. One game gets a live-action trailer, then all the games get live-action trailers. And now, Hawken's taking things to new heights with its very own live-action series - a series being headed up by Warner Bros, no less. And it stars Edi Gathegi, who's played major roles on everything from House to X-Men: First Class. It's set to kick off in 2013, but the first trailer - which, if it were really staying true to the logic of these things, would only come in the form of a paperback novel - is now available for your viewing... pleasure?
]]>As it stands, Hawken is the story of a few robots shooting a few other robots. Perhaps there's subtext and pentameter and denouements underneath it all, but right now, this is far from the Black Swan of artfully destructive mecha-ballets - let alone the Nutcracker. A recent live-action trailer, however, suggested that - for probably the first time in history - there's more than meets the eye to robots. And, if the folks at Adhesive Games have it their way, there'll be even more where that came from.
]]>Well, I wasn't expecting thing: Adhesive games' Hawken, the incredible-looking mecha-deathmatch that we've spent the past few months pining for, has got a live-action trailer, completed with grizzled-warrior voice over. You can watch it below.
I'm assuming this big-budget manner of trailering is down to Hawken's big deal, which is to appear first on cloud-gaming service, Gaikai. Hawken will be free-to-play, and its going to be available on Gaikai from December 12th. There's some kind of sign up for access at that time on the main site.
]]>OnLive and Gaikai are pretty silly names. I mean, OnLive is a made-up word that rolls off the tongue far better than it does the brain, and Gaikai actually refers to the ocean, which is sort of the opposite of the clouds. So when I saw "Nvidia" and "cloud gaming" in the same sentence, I was thrilled. What would a graphics hardware manufacturer with a history of impressively impenetrable names do when matched against this caliber of peer? "Grid," as it turns out. Well, er, OK. Man, that's not ridiculous at all. In consolation, it's promising latency that's "comparable, if not better, than gaming on a console at home." I guess that's something.
Alternative headline: Hawken Is Going To Be Playable First Over Gaikai.
]]>Whenever I watch Hawken footage, I need a bit of time alone afterwards to lie down and stop the room from spinning. Everything shakes in Adhesive's mech-on-mech FPS. Even the crosshairs judder in combat. I wish the bolts were a little bit tighter. While it's immersive, the localised earthquakes on feet seem to be engineered by evil dentists, intent on cracking the teeth of the drivers. I'll bet there's an option to auto-pilot the things right to a dentist's office for a mid-battle fixer-upper. That's the only explanation I'm considering, so don't fill the comments with alternatives after watching the video below, as there's almost no chance of me paying any heed to silly theories not based on the history of evil dentistry.
]]>Time to spin the wheel of game payment: the game is Hawken. A beautiful multiplayer, mech basher. What will we do to get it on our PC? Do we pay all-out, or is it going to land on this part of the wheel marked “free-for-all”. Ready? Spin! Tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-tock. Oh my! Put your money away, people. Hide your Dollars, burn your Euros (I know, it’s too easy), laminate your Lira, rip up your Real. Punt the Pound: Hawken is free.
]]>Absurdly beautiful, again. This is the footage from a level that was shown a PAX. The visual cleverness that is going on in Adhesive's multiplayer shooter is really quite something. I can't wait to take a closer look.
]]>We've seen quite a bit of footage of Hawken in action so far, but Adhesive send word that their first true teaser trailer for the beautiful mech-combat game has arrived, and you can see it below. It sets up the action with a bit of story, and then there's some lovely footage of the robots leaping about and blasting the hell out of each other. More on this game soon, I hope, and definitely another trailer at the end of the week, according to Adhesive.
]]>Via our exuberant American chums at G4, come some E3 leftovers in the form of Hawken footage, which I've cleverly reblogged below. Once again it's looking seriously impressive, this time showing off a "Siege" game mode, where players have to gather resources to launch battleships against opposing bases. Only the battleships can destroy the enemy base, but they themselves are vulnerable to attack, too. The piece is presented Adhesive's talented art lead, Khang Le.
]]>Is there a game in development that looks prettier than mech combat title Hawken? Perhaps not, which is remarkable, seeing as this is an indie game being assembled by no more than ten guys. Go, ten guys! I might not be entirely sold on your game's combat mechanics, but so long as you keep sticking apartment blocks in the sky I will love you.
After the jump you'll find a developer diary talking about the team's "design goals". which rather plays down the game's visuals to talk about the game proper. It's a bit like going to dinner with a supermodel only for her to keep talking about how she doesn't like regenerative health and so on. Which doesn't sound so bad, actually. What am I whinging about?
]]>There's some new Hawken footage. Hot damn.
]]>Yes, indie game. Hawken, the multiplayer mech combat game seen in the above screenshot and below video represents nine months work from Los Angeles-based studio Adhesive Games, a studio employing just nine people, but look at it! Absolutely incredible stuff. Thanks to RPS reader Christopher "The World Wide" Webb for sending this in.
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