Hawken - Clusterfuck of Happiness

Easter egg: The signs are clear - Pikachu and an angry cat. Not sure wtf the frog is all about.

Something strange has happened: I have passed the enthusiastic first 2 weeks mark and I still haven't lost interest in Hawken, something that rarely happens to me and F2P games - if ever.

I haven't put so many hours into a first person shooter since Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena or the beta 7 of Counter-Strike. Yes, I have to stress the beta bit to sound better than you. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" I hear you ask. Nothing. Hawken is just a fucking good game, which can be summed up as a more complex Call of Duty with mechs.

Yes, I said Call of Duty. Because not only do you run around and shoot stuff, but you gain money and experience as you play the game, which allows you to unlock weapons, upgrades and new mechs, just like in CoD. Okay, sure, there are no 25 different kinds of shotguns, 38 assault rifles and 250 million scopes and silencers to unlock, but nobody gives a shit about those. Instead, you get different kinds of mechs with different abilities. Here, have a pic of my mech getting repaired by another player's healing mech:

You can feel the love just by looking at this picture.

"But why would I want to be a healer when I could just run around and kill things?" Because players don't top the scoreboard depending on the amount of their kills, but their overall contribution. Assist in a kill, heal a team mate, defend a mission objective, be useful and receive bigger rewards. It's that simple. Good stuff.

Despite my rather modest amount of kills, I'm the top-scorer by far. The mission is everything...

Hurray!

Oh yeah, mission objectives. On top of the usual team-/deathmatch modes and a domination thingie (called Missile Launch or something) you get Siege Mode. Players of both teams collect energy from the two dispensers on each map. If you get killed with a full tank, you lose all your energy and it sits around where you died, so anyone can grab it - presumably the guy who just shot you.

Filling up those energy tanks whilst covering each other's asses against potential ambush.

Ideally, you get to fill up that tank of yours and make it back to your base in one piece. Once enough players have delivered their energy, your base will launch a huge-ass battleship.

Aw yiah, suck it all out!

Once your battleship is in the air, you need to fight for control over the anti air unit in the middle of the map. The team which controls this unit can use it to destroy the enemy battleship before it can do any damage.
One possible strategy is to camp and hold the anti air spot, wait for the other team to launch their ship and shoot it down, then launch your own. Or be quicker than the enemy team, launch your ship while they are still harvesting energy, rush to the anti air unit and occupy it while they're still trying to launch their own battleship.

Here is what happens if you don't destroy the enemy battleship:

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

This giant fucker of a ship will head straight for your base and shoot it to bits. Trying to destroy the battleship will take for fucking ever! If your base is blown up completely, you lose.

Well, fuck.

Siege has the potential to be the most awesome, exciting and the most frustrating, stupid mode of Hawken. Ideally, both teams know what they're doing and the match can turn into an arms race, which may take well over a half hour.
But the moment a game gets more complex than "just shoot stuff", stupid players will ruin it. If you've ever been part of a battlegrounds match in any major MMO, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Siege mode has a video tutorial. When you enter the game, a popup screen appears, tells you to collect energy, launch your ship and use the anti air cannon to destroy the enemy ship. The game goes out of its way to explain how it all works. And let's be honest here - it really isn't that fucking complicated.
But 90% of the time, one team wins in a massive landslide victory, because people on the other team have no fucking clue what to do. It's a bit frustrating when the scoreboard shows you as the only player on your team harvesting energy, while everybody else is just running around getting shot. It's more frustrating when team mates collect energy, then have no fucking clue what to do with it. If only there was a giant, flashing mission pointer, that tells you exactly where to deliv... oh wait, there is!

So yeah, it's perfectly normal to be the only player, who actually knows how Siege is played. It's always fun when some idiot on your team spots enemies and tells everyone their map coordinates. "But we're not supposed to farm kills, we gotta launch our battleship!"
-"STFU NOOB!"
Mkay.
Five minutes later, when you've lost with the enemy base completely unscathed, you'll see this, coming from the same guy:
"Fucking noob team!"
And he's probably got 12 kills, 38 deaths, not a single energy unit collected. In fact, you can see a guy like that on my scoreboard screenshot I posted earlier in this entry.
And once more, you'll wish for the ability to strangle stupid people through sheer hatred and willpower across the internet.

To be fair, you get this special little shithead in just about every other mode of the game, as well. Lost by a mile in a session of team deathmatch? Some guy with 2 kills and 14 deaths will blame his team for being fucking noobs. Internet behaviour and small dick syndrome at their greatest moments. "Quickly! We have lost, so I gotta blame it on my team to make perfectly clear that it's everyone else's fault and not my own!"
Another personal favourite of mine is when I'm told to "try again without hacks" whenever I end up in first place. Good times.

How the fuck do I line up a headshot in this game?

There is a huge content patch on the horizon, which will let players customize the abilities and strengths of their mechs. Right now, the game features skill trees, which do amazing things like raise your HP by 3.5% or your damage resistance by 1.6%, which is a fancy way of saying they do nothing. I'm curious to see how they're going to make the whole system more fun and a little more useful and, most of all, how to prevent that absolutely everyone simply puts every last point into the dps tree and ignores everything else. Because who gives a fuck about some extra HP and defenses in a first person shooter, when you could be specced to kill shit faster?

- Cat