Hawken is releasing on July 8 in North America and Europe for PlayStation 4, 505 Games and Reloaded Games announced today.
A free-to-play team-based first-person mech shooter, Hawken takes place on the battlefield of the dystopian world of Illal and includes over 30 customizable and upgradeable mechs. You’ll also find nine maps that range from jungle outposts to post-apocalyptic wastelands, as well as six game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Missile Assault, Siege, Coop Bot Destruction, and Coop vs AI Team Deathmatch.
Producer Josh Clausen talked about Hawken’s lore:
In the Hawken mythos, approximately 60 years from now humanity pioneers hyperdrive technology allowing for deep space exploration. From there, terraforming and colonizing efforts build a network of habitable planets. Eventually this leads to the discovery of a planet named Illal, which is deemed too risky and expensive to terraform; however, the potential profit prompts a set of multi-planetary corporations (MPCs) to purchase permission to do so privately.
Illal presents exceptionally difficult challenges, but the “Big Three” MPCs (Prosk, Crion, and Sentium) see a string of engineering breakthroughs that result in widespread industrial application of bipedal mechs for construction and mining. These product lines become immensely profitable, and Illal becomes a highly sought-after source of rare resources and industrial machinery.
Terraforming operations accelerate and Illal quickly becomes a near-habitable planet. Natural resource discovery and extraction rates are taken to whole new levels.
And then everything changes. When one of the big 3 MPCs, Prosk, discovers mineral deposits that allow them to create lighter, stronger, and more versatile mechs, they begin to dominate the market. The competition turns to covert paramilitary activities in order to secure this seemingly-magical material, known as cavorite. Mechs designed for industrial purposes are retrofitted for covert armed conflict. The Illal mech industry sets a new high-water mark among all human planets.
With cavorite deposits limited to known meteorite impact craters, research into a potential synthetic replacement becomes a focus for the Crion corporation. During a raid on a Crion research facility, an explosion causes one variant of these materials to be released into the environment. This is the epicenter of the self-replicating nano-virus informally known as the “Hawken virus” in honor of its first victim, the renowned scientist James Hawken.
The virus covered most of Illal’s surface in a metallic crust, killing much of the population. With the discovery of a high-density regenerative energy source called Vitrolium though, people are able to harvest the material and smuggle it off-world. While the galactic human population doesn’t see intervention as an official option due to the nano-virus, “the chance to obtain Vitrolium, however, creates an irresistible draw. Our game, Hawken, is set within this turbulent context.”
Will you be downloading Hawken?
[Source: PS Blog]
