Having now played it, oh dear.
You know, it’s okay for the dead to stay dead.
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 have two arms with guns stuck on the ends.
Left-click to fire left arm, right-click to fire right arm.
Now go shoot things.
Here’s how missions tend to go.
Start by following waypoint markers or an allied mech.
After a bit of boring jargon-filled exposition and crap banter over the radio, enemies arrive.
Kill them and another wave will spawn.
Fight two waves of enemies while NPCs blether away.
This repetition would be fine if Hawken Reborn’s violence was fun.
Strangely for a mech FPS, enemy mechs feel much less of a threat than footsoldiers or hovering drones.
And very strangely for a mech FPS, you’ve got the option to’t even squish soldiers underfoot.
No stompy squishing in a mech FPS!
Even this boring combat might be tolerable if Hawken Reborn were pretty enough for a good bit of gawking.
It was cool, confident, extravagant.
That 2011 prototype video still looks great!
What pushes Hawken Reborn from forgettable to unpleasant is its whole setup as a free-to-play game.
Hawken Reborn lets you build whole new mechs as well as upgrade mech parts and weapons.
Crafting uses the many materials and schematics you scavenge from corpses and junk.
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.
This costs ‘Scrip’, a microtransaction currency bought in bundles for real money.
you’re able to also buy new mechs and equipment outright with Scrip from a store.
Right now, for example, one mech is on sale for 1161 Scrip.
The game clearly doesn’t expect you to do this.
It’s hard to tell the final shape of Hawken Reborn this early in early access.
But that’s only a reason to grind, not motivation.
Why bother when Hawken Reborn is so uninteresting and values your time so little?
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.
