After five years, the sequel to 505 Games’ Hawken has been revealed with an official trailer and an announcement for an early release on May 17th. Hawken Reborn (the title of the sequel) is still in its early stages, which is why the early access is meant to give the developers an idea of what is working with the game so far and what needs to be developed according to Steam. Additionally, there will only be six playable story-event missions to go through in the PvE section of the game, which will be added to as the game develops further.
The original Hawken was a machine-based PvP game where players used machines to battle each other in FPS matches according to Xbox’s description of the game. There were over thirty different mechs at launch to choose from and was received well on its release back in December of 2012, scoring 73 on Metacritic.
Unfortunately, the original game was taken down back in January of 2018 according to PCGamer because the game wanted to refocus their development efforts. This means that fans have not had proper access to the game in over five years, which makes this announcement extra exciting.
Hawken Reborn will be a different spin on the mech-fighting genre, as instead of being the PvP-based game its predecessor was, it will now be primarily PvE with a focus on co-op gameplay to go through hordes of enemies according to TheGamer. This game is also set to be free for both early release as well as its official release later down the line.
Hawken Reborn is set to be in its early access period for about eighteen months. After that, it is unknown how much longer the game’s official release will take, but the early access period officially releases on Steam on May 17th.