E3 2011: Mech Combat Evolved with Tons of New Hawken Info

In early March, the debut trailer for the new indie Mech-FPS game, Hawken, was released and wowed gamers world-wide.Hawken shows off impressive graphics, for an indie game, and the gameplay seems original and very interesting. Not much else has been seen of the game until the developers recently gave out some new information and gameplay footage of their game.

The game has only been in development for 11 months, so everything you are seeing is far from what the finished product will look like.

The game is being built with the Unreal Engine 3 and will be online multiplayer only. It will feature the usual game modes of Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch but there will also be two team-based modes which haven’t been announced yet. My guess is that one of these game modes will be another survival mode where you will face waves of increasingly difficult enemies; it’s almost as if the “Horde” game mode is obligatory these days. As for the other team based mode, the developers have been very silent about it which leads me to believe that it is probably something rather unique.

Only 11 months of development, but the game looks great already!

The Mechs in Hawken have different builds, which work similarly to Brink‘s body size type. There will be three builds to chose from: light, medium and “mech”, the latter wasn’t shown as it is still being developed. The light body type will be a fast moving mech which can jump and dash around quickly and using little fuel, however it will be the weakest Mech of the bunch and can be destroyed easily if found standing still. The “mech” built wasn’t shown in action, but it will be a slow but heavily armoured Mech, most useful when defending a position, but also a valuable offensive character. The medium build will be a balance between the other two classes, balancing speed and power.

Picking a build is important, not only for the amount of health one will have but also for your mobility and fuel consumption. Using your jetpack, dashing, hopping and spinning all require fuel. Fuel regenerates, however it can only be used in short bursts. This is done as such in order to prevent people spamming their dashes and “bunny-hopping” around the map. Light builds consume less fuel, therefore they can jetpack for longer and use speed to their advantage. Heavier body types will be forced to keep their dashes and jetpack usage to a minimum as their fuel consumption can only allow short uses. This makes heavier body types very weak in a situation which requires quick movement.

At the beginning of the match, players will get to spend points in three different categories: speed, defense and offense. These points are the same for every player, no new points will be earned over time. This can lead to interesting combinations: for example, a light build Mech can have all of its points spent on speed so that it will be faster than even the average light Mech, or, maybe, one may chose to invest his points in defense to have extra health. These points can be spent to better suit your play style and give yourself a role in the team.