My working title for this article was: “Miss Titanfall? Play Hawken Reborn”. While Hawken was a very different game to Titanfall or its sequel, capturing the lumbering weight of mech warfare rather than Respawn’s slick movement, they’re two of the most iconic mech games out there. Much like Titanfall, Hawken’s servers shut down years ago, and there has been a dearth of good mech content since.
So, when I saw Hawken Reborn, I was intrigued. One of the masters of the genre, reforged from the scrap and debris that the original left behind? I’m in. If it’s even half as good as the original, we’d be in for a fun time, and I was going in with a forgiving mind given that Reborn has launched in early access, too. But what I found was a horrible facsimile of the original game, a bastardisation of everything that made Hawken special.
This isn’t a remake or remaster, it’s a new game entirely. While that could be a good thing in some circumstances, developer 505 Games seems to have forgotten why players loved Hawken and has taken myriad shortcuts in order to get this game released, tarnishing a classic’s enduring legacy in the process.
First impressions are bad. While I can’t confirm that the opening cutscenes are AI art, they certainly look like it, which is an awful precedent to set for the rest of the game. The best case scenario is that this is an early access placeholder that 505’s artists will improve on down the line, and the worst case is that the company is actively sabotaging its own industry by undermining artists and not even creating anything worth looking at in the process. Many fans have already pointed this out, so expect a confirmation either way, and likely an apology tweet, in the coming days.
It doesn’t get much better from there. Once you’re in the cockpit, everything’s changed. The health bar that used to be in the centre bottom of the screen, as if it was a diegetic piece of the control unit, is now at the top like in every other video game. There used to be a low hum at all times, the noise of your mech’s systems keeping it upright and in the fight. That’s gone. There was a weight to every movement, you felt like you were piloting a ten-ton hunk of metal. Now it’s… not quite floaty, but the mech’s feet may well be made of a titanium-helium alloy. All those little things that make mechs feel alive – the tiny screen shake as your feet hit the ground, the nigh-imperceptible whirs as you turn, the sense that your battle robot has been cobbled together out of a pile of grimy scrap – are absent.
The only thing that Reborn has adapted faithfully is Hawken’s monetisation model. While common for the time, pay-to-skip-the-grind monetisation has long grown tiresome. We put up with it in a game as stylish and fun as Hawken, but in this shameful rip off? No chance.
The problems with Hawken Reborn aren’t really the shortcuts or the bad enemy AI, though, it’s the lack of style. In the original, the Brawler looked like a brutalist monument on legs. The CR-T was essentially an old telly with the same appendages crudely grafted onto its underbelly. The mechs looked cool, individual in both appearance and function, thanks to seamless art direction. This was backed up by the gameplay that made it feel like you were piloting this awesome hunk of junk. It all came together to make a special game.
Hawken Reborn feels like the exact opposite. You feel nothing when you get into the cockpit, and your heart rate doesn’t rise during any of the game’s six short, repetitive missions. It’s Hawken in name and nothing else. I usually give early access games the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard not to be cynical about Hawken Reborn. This is a cash-grab in every sense of the word, and a shadow of the game we loved.