Are you a fan of ill-fated 2017 mech FPS Hawken? Some potentially good news is coming your way. Some fans on the Hawken Refugees Discord server have been working on a Hawken revival, and they've managed to get the game up and running. There are, of course, some caveats.
For a start, the Hawken revival project is only playable in offline mode. Your opponents will exclusively be AI-controlled bots rather than other players. That might be a deal-breaker if you're looking for human enemies, but it's a start. According to the folks over at r/pcgaming, work is ongoing to reverse-engineer Hawken's code in order to allow for online play via private servers.
Who's behind this Hawken revival?
In the above Reddit thread about Hawken's revival, user DragonStrike406 claims to be the orchestrator of the revival project. DragonStrike406 claims they're nothing to do with the original Hawken developers. A user asks DragonStrike406 about a timeline for multiplayer. DragonStrike406 says multiplayer will be "ready when it's ready". Apparently, since Hawken was originally constructed in Unreal Engine 3, which has since had all support forums and similar technical help avenues deleted. As such, reconstruction work on the game is being done largely around Unknown Cheats forums.
The original Hawken was a free-to-play mech-based first-person shooter. It launched on PC in open beta back in December 2012, with Xbox One and PlayStation 4 releases following in 2016. Servers for the game were shut down in January 2018, which prevented anyone from playing Hawken. On the same day, all DLC was removed for the game from the Steam store. Clearly, there's still an audience out there for Hawken, although it remains to be seen whether it's a substantial enough one for DragonStrike406 and their collaborators to continue work on the project. We'll bring you more on this as we get it.
Would you play a Hawken revival? Were you a big fan of the original? Let us know in the comments below!
