Hawken Beta Preview

The game features incredibly well rendered battle stages. The premise of Hawken is straight up fast paced yet remaining fully immersed in gameplay. The amount of fire power allowing us to pilot a single mecha is astonishing. The level of detail put into not only the interior of the mech, but also the environment of the levels. This is the greatest looking sci-fi mech warrior MMO to date.

With any mech combat game people just love modifying, by dropping different parts and switching them as they go. The level of customization and the interface while doing so is marvelous, giving each mecha three weapon slots. One for each arm, and an extra for switching in between deaths. Giving users more fire power for when the going gets tough. You also have several different slots for different mechs you create through out your play through.

The game sports four levels of customizing: Equipment, Upgrades, Optimizations, and the Body Shop. Equipment is what is currently equipped on your mecha for offensive, defensive, and functional items. Each one has different elements to chose from to change up your gameplay. Upgrades acts like your average skill tree, with boosting offensive damage, maximizing defense, and increased movement skills. The body shop has you changing up the different parts of your mech, legs, body, arms, thruster, and repair drone. You can also change the texture and the colour of your mech, including the trim.

The game modes featured in the beta were Siege, Team Deathmach, and Free-for-all Deathmach. Siege is a game mode where two massive bases fight in a struggle for resources. Siege you gather energy units to build a battleship, which battles it out across the field to the enemy base, where the enemies are doing the same. It really is quite epic in perspective in the video posted below.

Another aspect of the game are RPG skill points. You start out with 3 on each round and you invest them into speed, defense, or attack. With the three different mecha types in combination with the customization, you’re able to create tank orientated play styles, or a scout orientation. Just take a light mech and spend points on speed. This goes for defensive and offensive mechs as well. The combinations are endless.

I’ll let the visuals in the video speak for itself. Allowing the viewer to take the control over a small mecha in a brief time period is just too short. So I compacted the monstrosity of this game in a music video (which can be found at the bottom of this review). To experience the gritty and intense game-play action first hand must be on everybody’s list this 12/12/12.

The system requirements are as follows:

Minimum:
INTEL CPU – CELERON E1200 DUAL-CORE 1.6GHz
AMD CPU – ATHLON 64 X2 DUAL-CORE 3600+
NVIDIA GPU – GEFORCE GT130
AMD GPU – RADEON X800 PRO
RAM – 2GB

Maximum:
INTEL CPU – CORE 2 QUAD Q6400
AMD CPU – ATHLON II X3 440
NVIDIA GPU – GEFORCE GTX 260
AMD GPU – RADEON HD 4870
RAM – 4GB

Used in Video:
INTEL CPU – COREi5 3.20GHz
ATI GPU – RADEON HD 5570
RAM – 4GB