Hawken Alpha 2 and in the Beta here. The servers were down on part of Saturday I know. Patch and such. Then there was another patch later. Didn't check.
Hawken is more like a FPS. That is agreed by me. They didn't change much from the Alpha to Beta. Imagine a cross of Mechwarrior and Armored Core, with CoD and you'll know how Hawken plays. Where Hawken really does good on is frantic combat and world design. Where it fails is that it is leaning towards pay 2 win model. Mech designs, specially stock, are poor.
Myself and others have been warning the Hawken devs not to go pay 2 win. Alpha it was a nice setup. You just paid for parts and cosmetic addons. Beta, whoa...pay 2 win features added. XP boosts for money/etc. If Hawken fails, it'll be because people just drop support for it for this reason. The game is good, it should be marketed as a $50+ game with DLC packs. But its going F2P with potential P2W model. That alone kills a lot of support from me.
I honestly did not play it heavily during either Alpha or Beta, but more for Beta. Reason why is because I wanted more maps to test. Also once I adjusted to the mechs I found the TDM to be dull. Really once you do it a few times, it becomes too easy. I'd go match after match in 1st place with almost no deaths.
Beta I played more than Alpha because of the Siege mode. In Alpha I really wanted an objective based mode, Beta delivered it. In Alpha we had a missile control mode. Just basic control point gameplay on a textureless map. Horrible and no real team work involved.
Siege was neat. Being an alpha 2 I knew the controls and handling much better so I'd come in with the weakest Berserker mech and mop the floor with everyone. Voice chat worked very well and I'd have Beta noobs whipped into unstoppable teams in no time. Had one really awesome match where down by 2 and had only 1 base defense left. Enemy team was still full strength. Folks chimed up over voice, we coordinated strategy. People weren't rushing in guns blazing alone anymore. Turned around and won. So evenly matched, great fight. But our strategy change worked. It showed how good the game can really be.
