HAWKEN

Old-school shooter is sharp and with its perfect visuals is also additive and deadly. [Jan 2013]

They've nailed the sensation of stomping around in a giant machine, but the F2P model needs an oil change.

Quotation forthcoming.

Hawken shows that piloting a mech doesn't have to be a complex task, and it gets players straight into the action. [Aug 2013, p.92]

Very ambitious, but we’d urge them to concentrate on the game; with poor matchmaking, few maps, overly simple game modes and a limited free game, players might not stick around. And that would be a shame.

If you're a fan of battling bots, Hawken is definitely worth checking out, and you should certainly have some free, fleeting fun with it right off the bat. But as the game lumbers towards an official release, I really hope they dial down the mechanized money magnets.

It's a fun diversion, to be sure, but with its less-than-extensive customization options, absurd reliance on grinding to incentivize microtransactions, and limited variation in actual gameplay, it probably isn't worth a monetary investment.

This is by far one of my all time favorite Arena FPS games. Most FPS games rely on twitchy COD mechanics to win whereas in Hawken, you actually have to use Strategy AND Teamwork to win. I won't lie and say the game isn't a bit glitchy. But that isn't surprising considering that the game is still in BETA. Please keep that in mind when you play. Happy Hunting Pilot!

generally fun but there's too much grind unless you're actually spending money. the recruit mech does often place top, but which mechs actually do well seems almost random, where a medium-short range combat mech like the assault or crt recruit, and others where a medium long range mech like the reaper does best. now this is influenced by the other player mech types, but a lot of it is the map.

I am generally terrible at FPS games and do not play them a lot. This game has a large variation of mech types and the combat is fun and with the ability to take a few hits and heal between fights it adds a tactical element. I have played for a little bit and find the f2p model to be very similar to LoL where you can't really buy wins. I haven't spent a dime and ranked in the top three of some matches using the standard starter mech.

Mar 24, 2014. I keep losing connection to the host. The game looks fun but it's frustrating to be kicked out so often and the gameplay (for me) is a little jerky, it's definitely not smooth.

Before reading keep this in mind: I only played this game for 2 hours, before I genuinely got bored of the game. I'm not saying it has no depth, it has plenty, the skill ceiling for booster jet juking is pretty high, it just doesn't have any meat to the potatoes. There's roughly a dozen mechs, all of which have 3 weapons to choose from, max. The only customization that I could see were just different cooldown/oh f##k buttons. Coming from Mechwarrior online, the lack of customization in a mech game is crippling for me. The blatant lie about there being "sniping" in the game also bothered me. The maps are so small that you're basically up in the face of every single person, and the "long range" weapons have the same shell travel time as everything else, meaning hitting that incredibly dim, hard-to-see mech that's hiding behind the fog of impaired vision is ungodly difficult. This leads to situations where you're face-to-face with the far tankier, better-equipped mechs that are designed for close combat. There are also no real hitboxes, unlike Mechwarrior Online, 90% of the time you'll just be firing wildly, trying to flank as there's no incentive to take carefully aimed, skillful shots. As of this date the game still feels very empty and lacking a lot of the content you may initially expect, such as mech customization and more intuitive combat than spamming thrusters and aiming in the general direction of the enemy. People have likened it to Call of Duty: Mechs, and they would be both right and wrong. It's very different from CoD but plays the same, if that makes sense. It's F2P and I recommend at least trying it out to see if you like it, but keep your expectations reasonable as this game doesn't have much more to it than CoD.