A new first-person gameplay trailer for the upcoming mech combat game Hawken is out and it is quite simply amazing.
I know a thing or two about mech games, so you can trust me when I say that Hawken, based on this gameplay trailer, looks absolutely freakin’ incredible. Making it even more impressive is that the “small indie team” known as Adhesive has apparently only been working on the game for nine months. Just nine months, and they’ve got a trailer that has me more excited about giant fighting robots than anything since Mechwarrior 2.
Unlike my associate Mr. Funk, I’m a big fan of the heavy, hard-hitting military machines of Western-style mecha, and while the units on display in this Hawken trailer are perhaps a bit more agile than I’m used to, they still give off enough of a massive, plodding vibe to set my heart a-flutter. What the final mech selection will be like is anybody’s guess, but it doesn’t seem entirely beyond reason to think that maybe the team will be able to strike enough of a balance in styles to keep everybody happy.
“I’m a die hard MechWarrior fan so when I got approached to design sounds for Hawken it was a very easy answer for me,” Sound Designer Sean Neri said on Reddit. “However with that said, we have definitely gone in a bit of a different direction from MechWarrior.”
“The thing that is most striking about this game is the size of the Mechs in contrast to the speed they move,” he added. “Most Mech games have it one way or the other, this game has large Mechs moving very fast… This makes it very challenging to design sound for!”
The Hawken website says the video is comprised entirely of footage captured during actual gameplay and that there are many other aspects of the game that aren’t shown in the trailer. “However, we feel it gives a good first glimpse and are looking forward to releasing more media,” the studio said.
Not bad after nine months of development. Not bad at all.
