News: Hawken sold to Reloaded Games
Posted on : 16-03-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PC
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If you’re wondering what happened to Hawken, well Adhesive Games and their publisher Meteor sold the game in a bankruptcy sale to Reloaded Games. This is the same Reloaded Games that picked up APB after it tanked. So while there is a light at the end of the tunnel for Hawken, it definitely looks like a train in this case.
The real shame is that back in 2011, Hawken could have been something amazing. The final game was decent too but the freemium model utterly ruined it. If they had released the game as a singleplayer only XBLA or PSN game, like they planned to originally, then things would have likely turned out for the better. Shifting to a freemium setup with a customisable mecha game, where you paid for parts, was never going to end well.
So here’s to good mecha games ruined by capricious and short sighted publishers. Hopefully Hawken won’t die off quite yet but it could have been so much more.
Hawken started to fail when they introduced the Medic/Tech mech, that
completely changed how people fought and how battles took place, because
of it certain mechs had to be nerfed because with the Tech following
them around like a lost puppy they were OP, the devs destroyed pub play
with that thing, then of course later we lost all comms, this made pub
play pretty much hopeless. There were a lot of other problems, but I
think you’re right, the game would have been better in it’s original
release format, that way we might have even got a Hawken 2. I had a real
blast on Hawken for the first year, but it lost it’s way for sure.
I also enjoyed the game when it first came out, even though I was frequently trashed and died a lot. I mean A LOT. Anyway, I haven’t played the game in a while, so I wasn’t aware that it was down or had come to an end. Maybe a dedicated single player mode could indeed turn things around on a console release. I always enjoyed the aesthetics and handling of the game, especially after the Raider and Predator classes, which I actually enjoyed using and found some success with.