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Hawken Reborn is a bland singleplayer mech FPS built on a hostile free-to-play modelAnd you can’t even stomp on people
And you can’t even stomp on people
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / 505 Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / 505 Games
A sequel toHawkenwas certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPSshut 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-upHawken Rebornon 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.
Hawken Reborn - Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube
Hawken Reborn - Reveal Trailer
So, your spaceship crash-lands on a planet quarantined due to a nanite infestation and a friendly faction pull you from the wreckage. Then something something PMCs blah blah revered old tech whatever whatever ooh how mysterious who are you things things and you get to stomp around in a mech doing fights. It’s an uninteresting blast of sci-fi words and emptiness, and wrapped in dull banter between NPCs. But the important part is: mechs.
You start with a cute scrappy little mech about the size of a two-up two-down terraced house, an agile lad moreTitanfallthanMechWarrior. You have two arms with guns stuck on the ends. Left-click to fire left arm, right-click to fire right arm. Hit shift for a quick directional dash with your jetpack, hit space to jump, and hold space to soar into the air. Now go shoot things.
Plot is told through radio banter and eerie comic book cutscenes |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / 505 Games
HAWKEN - Official Trailer (Work in Progress)This 12-year-old Hawken trailer still looks better than Hawken RebornWatch on YouTube
HAWKEN - Official Trailer (Work in Progress)
Hawken Reborn lets you build whole new mechs as well as upgrade mech parts and weapons. Maybe you want to swap your machinegun out for a laser and wham on a shotgun, then boost your shields and charge your engines. Crafting uses the many materials and schematics you scavenge from corpses and junk. The game freely offers a few wee upgrades in crafting tutorials, and from then on it’s all grindy and uninteresting.
After I had completed the current campaign and pootled a bit around Patrol, gathering every glowing resource drop I saw and smashing every scrap pile, I had not collected enough materials to craft even one new gun. Abandoning my dreams of stompy new toys, I spent what I had on upgrading my current gear. One upgrade reduced a gun’s reload time from 2 seconds to 1.98 seconds. What a dizzying thrill.
That’s about £1 to top up with the crafting materials I lack to finish one of the two parts I need to craft this gun |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / 505 Games
Oh, but if you don’t have enough resources to complete something, the game will helpfully point out you can buy just enough parts, calculating a bespoke price to finish the job. This costs ‘Scrip’, a microtransaction currency bought in bundles for real money. You can also buy new mechs and equipment outright with Scrip from a store. Right now, for example, one mech is on sale for 1161 Scrip. Anyone who’s played a hostile free-to-play game before will not be surprised to learn that this is just a little more than you can buy in a single bundle, with the closest being 1100 Scrip (£3.99) and 2400 Scrip (£7.99).
It’s hard to tell the final shape of Hawken Reborn this early in early access. It feels like a big part of the endgame will be playing Patrols, which have a Tarkov-ish element of risking losing everything you’ve gathered on a run if you die. Some Patrol areas have tougher enemies, and all enemies get tougher over time, so you’ll need a decent mech to last long and get the good goodies. But that’s only a reason to grind, not motivation. Why bother when Hawken Reborn is so uninteresting and values your time so little?
In a world already too full of live service games which ache to monopolise your time and wear you down with ungenerous grind until microtransactions become tempting, Hawken Reborn so far seems another also-ran. Borrowing the name of a game which people remember fondly only makes it more disappointing. And it doesn’t even have that cool Hawken city.
