Hawken

[66492f68c3c70Kolya]

I've been playing this game quite a lot lately. It's a "free to play" mech war game in "open beta". This means the snazzier features require you to pay for an ingame currency, eg if you want a mech that doesn't look like a walking TV set. There are only 4 maps, the backend interface is confusing as hello?! and you get uneven matches, occasional graphic bugs, some missing features, etc. So why spend time on it, much less pay money for that? A video may answer that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWvDkvEzlQQ

That's right, it's robo-war in Greeblehausen. The levels look as if they were ripped out of Tsutomo Nihei's manga Blame!. That's enough reason for me to play it.
Unfortunately the producers are contradicting these desaturated earthen levels with an unhealthy emphasis on effects that they are slapping on an already badly optimised game.
As a player you are left with little options for that. There is only one "Graphics" slider in the backend which controls various effects that look nice for a moment until you notice your frame rate just dropped by two thirds and you can't see shit, which is somewhat detrimental to a multiplayer shooter. So you mumble something about "graphics whores..." and turn that slider off completely.

The most crippling aspect of the game though is that modifications and tinkering with your mech, which played such a magnificent role in the Mech Warrior game series, are severely reduced in Hawken by the fact that there simply isn't much equipment to choose from. And for the few stuff there is, you either have to pay hard cash or grind through dozens of matches.
There also is a skill tree that you you have to earn points for by levelling, only to find out that the skills mostly don't do anything ("0.000005% more armor per point" Oh my!).
Tip: The "Siege" mode rewards you with a lot more XP than any other game mode. But Siege isn't very fun.

All in all Hawken is an incredibly looking mech war game that is being held back by a lack of maps, equipment and game optimisation. Maybe that will change once it gets out of beta, but don't hold your breath for it, development seems slow and moving in the wrong direction (more special effects).

EDIT: Looks like they released a patch this morning. It doesn't install though and now their server crashed.

[66492f68c3e1aslacker-in-denial]

Oh wow, this is finally out?
If only the gaming media wasn't so bad at leaving me out of the loop on almost anything decent, I might've already known, cheers Kolya.

Its been a long time since i've seen a decent Mech game and this looks like it lives up in terms of sound, visual and overall virtual thrill, but it seems to be lacking the finer strategic elements that made the Mechwarrior franchise so addicting.

Also, sorry to rant, but i'm kind of sick of the nature of free to play multiplayer games these days, they don't all need to be experience point based RPG's, it makes getting into them quite annoying as I can't access whatever I want in terms of gameplay and levels immediately.

[66492f68c40d2Kolya]

Just like you, I suppose, I had seen a preview video months ago that already looked quite breathtaking. A few days ago I wondered what happened to it. Seems like they came out of closed beta (into open beta) last December.
This weekened there were quite a few server outages (again today). Annoyingly the Hawken game launcher will still say "Loaded. Patcher working..." then and even falsely report servers as being online. This was when servers clearly were not online, the website gave a 503 server error during that time. Oh well, beta issues that will hopefully be figured out eventually.