At this weekend’s PAX East, Adhesive Games and Meteor Entertainment hosted a party to allow fans to get a hands-on demo of the upcoming PC mech shooter Hawken.  The level we played took place in a city.  Ten minute rounds of six-on-six team deathmatch were the order of the day.

            A total of four mech types were available:  light long-range, light short-range, medium long-range, and short long-range.  Each type had its own weapon loadout, but that can be customized to suit one’s own tastes:  several types of missiles, machine guns, and a shotgun-like flak cannon were a few of the weapons available.  Switching out weapons prior to re-spawning changes the look of the mech, but what each weapon can do is not necessarily apparent by sight alone.

            The gameplay is fast and frantic.  Twelve mechs (called Sabers in the game) were running, jumping, shooting, and turning in a brutal ballet of bullets, missiles, metal, and destruction.  Light Sabers are noticeably faster than medium ones, but even the mediums can sprint and turn on a dime.  These aren’t your daddy’s lumbering BattleMechs, standing toe to toe and trading blows.  In Hawken, speed is life.  A quick tap of the ‘Shift’ and ‘S’ keys pulls off a 180° turn in less than a second.  ‘Shift-A’ and ‘Shift-D’ are a quick lunge to the left or right.  These moves, however, can be tricky to pull off in the middle of a fight.  It requires a certain set of finger gymnastics that can be hard to manage.  This can be a serious issue, because if you aren’t moving, you are dying.  On those rare occasions that you get a breather, you can hunker down and repair yourself.

            For an early build of the game, the graphics were crisp and the framerate was excellent.  There were some issues I ran into, however.  The HUD shows a lot of information at once, and it can be hard to keep track of the Saber you’re fighting, the minimap, your health, and how close your weapons are to overheating.  A lack of distinctive markings makes target acquisition take half a second too long.

An inside view of the cockpit.

            The two factions, known as the Sentium and the Prosk, are functionally identical.  They can choose the same weapons. Their Sabers have the same stats, although Hawken producer Jason Hughes says that the factions will have aesthetic differences in the final game.  In the final build of the game, players will be able to pay for new guns and new cosmetic features, but Hughes says that the game will not fall into that trap that turns off so many people when they hear “free-to-play.”  Paying for guns will not be a sure way to victory, and if you don’t want to pay, well, you can get new gear through gameplay alone, though it will take longer.

            One game mechanic that was not in the demo version of the game is using experience points to increase the effectiveness of your mechs.  Experience will grant skill points that can be used to further customize your Saber, and each one (light, medium, and heavy) will have its own skill tree that can be leveled up independently.  According to Hughes, five people using the same weapon loadout on the same Saber can still have slightly different gameplay experiences.  When asked if this meant that skill trees will include active abilities as well as passive bonuses, Hughes was noncommittal.  When asked about other features, Hughes said that joystick support was a possibility.  If not for the launch of the game, he said, the free-to-play model allows them to put an update like that into the game easily post-launch.

            Hawken will release as a free-to-play title for the PC on 12/12/12.  Though the game is still eight months away, it shows some real promise as yet another game that helps chip away at the pre-conceived notions of free-to-play games as cheap cash-ins.  With some minor tweaks and additional features not yet shown to the public, Hawken could very well become the premier mech combat game for years to come.