Hawked may look familiar, but it’s got some great new ideas | Hands-on preview
On the surface of it, you might be forgiven for mixing Hawked with Fortnite. There’s no getting away from it. Epic’s battle royale phenomenon is a clear inspiration for UPWAKE.ME’s PvPvE Extraction game. From the aesthetics to the tone, from the sound design to the environments – even how weapons are dropped from crates and chests and quietly spin on the ground until someone picks them up. But in a world with surprisingly few developers willing to risk going head to head with Fortnite, Hawked does so with confidence and a lot of interesting – if not wholly original – ideas.
I recently spent some time playing Hawked during an online presentation to show off the new game and let us get to grips with how it feels. Despite – or maybe because of – the obvious influences, I came away feeling pretty pleased with what I saw and anxious to play more.
Hawked takes place on X-Isle, a fairly unimaginatively-named playspace, but one with scope to shift and change with future content drops and updates. It’s a mysterious island filled with ancient treasures, deadly traps and fierce lizard men, and has attracted the attention of GRAIL, an organisation of mercenary treasure-hunters determined to liberate said artefacts for the sake of historical preservation. And money, of course. Loads of that.
The last time a game went in for the Fortnite aesthetic mixed with extraction gameplay, we got The Cycle. It struggled to find an audience, and was later rebranded to The Cycle: Frontier before dying a sudden and unceremonious death a short time later. UPWAKE.ME intend to avoid that fate with Hawked by going all-in on accessibility and fun right from the off.
As a result, Hawked doesn’t take itself seriously. You’ll drop into X-Isle in groups of three on special hoverboards that, sadly, only work on water. Once you’re on the ground, you’ll need to tool up (for some reason you can’t take weapons with you), but finding crates or chests. Weapons are colour-coded by level and rarity, and a melee weapon allows you to deal damage up close or clear debris and vines.
You also have a grappling hook for getting around and crossing gaps, and you can pole-vault over small drops, which is cool but a little unwieldy. Your objective is to find treasures, solving puzzles together to overcome traps and acquire as many Glyphs as you can, until you have enough to open the Treasury. Inside this Vault lies the Artefact, and retrieving it is the only way to win. Or, well, you can kill everyone else.
Aside hordes of lizard-like Disciples, you’ll also face off against opposing teams who will be trying to first beat you to the Treasury, and then kill you to claim the Artefact. Once you see a red Grail symbol appear, that’s your target: some other player racing pell-mell for the Extraction Point. At this point exploration and puzzle-solving are dropped in favour of frantic teamwork and pitched gun battles. The shooting is tight and responsive, the weapons offering a decent variety from shotguns to grenade launchers.
If you go down, your teammates can revive you at special shrines, rebuilding your squad to continue the race for riches. Your loadout doesn’t just include guns, either. You’ll also need Gear and Exo items, which are equippable abilities that can change the course of a match. For example, there’s an item called an Infernat Lantern, which releases a swarm of stinging Infernats that will find enemies and inflict burning.
You can also equip up to three Artefacts, which provide special skills and buffs for the match. The Survival Slab, for instance, creates a massive stone barrier for 3 seconds after you take damage. Each of these abilities can be a life-saver, and as you’re able to mix and match them there’s a strong potential for build diversity that simply doesn’t exist in games like Fortnite.
This is going to be Hawked’s greatest strength: it has new ideas. You’ll spend a lot of time in a central hub where you can customise your character, equip loadouts, and interact with NPCs who will give you bonus objectives or buy and sell items. This is fairly standard, but once you’re in the field you’ll have no idea which Gears and Artefacts the other team has equipped, and the potential to need to build a certain way to account for multiple eventualities is exciting.
From the small amount I played, I can say that Hawked feels like a new game in old skin. Yes, it’s incredibly bright and attractive, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before on the surface of it. However, dig just a little deeper, and there’s a huge amount of creativity on display with the potential to offer something that other extraction shooters and battle royale games simply don’t.
Hawked is “coming soon” to PC.
