Hawked Hands-On Preview: It’s a Less Serious Extraction Shooter

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The extraction shooter is blowing up, and upcoming release Hawked might be the most approachable shot at the PvPvE genre yet. Where other games focus on an aggressively tight and hardcore experience, Hawked is importing some game design from the more approachable battle royales in order to get you into rounds of treasure-hunting mayhem with much less commitment.

The setup is simple. You and a team of friends pop up on an island overrun with lizard monsters to recover valuable seemingly-magical artifacts from the ancient ruins there before the lizards—or the other treasure hunters—can do the same. Taking out camps of lizards lets you loot new weapons and gear for this trip out, while going around solving puzzles gets you the key pieces of info you need to open up the treasure vault at the core of each round. Get the artifact inside, get out, and you win that round—unlocking or upgrading that artifact as a piece of gear for future runs.

Of course, that’s not the only treasure around. The dang lizards have also already bogarted a piece, and hunting down their treasure-carrying dinosaur will let you nab a second artifact in each round. The problem with that route is that everyone else knows exactly where the dino loot is, so trying to nab that artifact is much more likely to put you in conflict with enemy teams—and there are ten teams of three out there gunning for the same two pieces of loot.

For all that, though, the map didn’t feel crowded during the preview. Most of a match was exploring, taking down lizards to gear up, and finding clues to the vault. Lizards are all over the place too, meaning that if your team is willing to pick a few fights they can get their preferred gear pretty quickly. At the same time, some of those lizard packs have dangerous elites in them that hit much harder or have special abilities—the big crocodile guys pack a punch.

The island really is crowded with stuff, and broad open spaces are pretty rare. That means any fight with an enemy team ends up being a surprise meeting or an ambush by one side or the other. The thick jungle, constant ravines and cliffs, and densely placed ruins are all tightly placed and long lines of sight are hard to find while cover is plentiful. That’s good, because while you do have a recharging shield, getting caught in the open under fire is a death sentence.

The PvP felt pretty good, emphasizing focus-firing and using your abilities and quick movement to avoid getting hit. Strong play will definitely emphasize knowing the terrain, mastering the sliding movement, where you can grapple to climb, and balancing waterways to move fast on your hoverboard with stealthier movement through the jungle. At the same time, abilities that do stuff, like drop a barrier or heal allies, are going to be clutch—you can revive your teammates, but it’s a lengthy process that’s not going to happen often mid-fight.

Hawked’s most unique thing is definitely the exploring and puzzle-solving that go along with the environment.

Hawked’s most unique thing is definitely the exploring and puzzle-solving that go along with the environment. Each clue to the vault combination is found at a site that itself has some kind of puzzle to solve or event to do. The simplest just challenges your team to stay in a circle for a limited time while enemies spawn. The more complex ones have you solving problems like memory puzzles, where you have to remember a pattern and then recreate it. Or a puzzle where you have to align symbols to match a predetermined order.

For me that was actually the coolest part of Hawked. These kinds of many-player battle games engage a really specific part of your brain that wants to spot small details, tiny movements, and gauge environments for danger. You’re often focused on which weapon you should use, or upgrade to grab, or what your teammate is doing. Having to then activate the more broad, analytical-creative part of your brain to match symbols or identify a pattern was a great change of pace and challenge in an otherwise pretty fast-paced shooter.

Hawked has an established aesthetic, riffing on what’s popular now without too much of its own unique vibe. Whether that works for you is probably already decided. What’s going to sell Hawked, then, is definitely the core gameplay. I wasn’t totally sold there, but I wasn’t totally turned off either. The guns were cool, with a decent amount of variety from melee weapons, normal assault rifles, energy guns with heat meters, and even weird things like minelaying weapons and a really nasty grenade launcher.

Having to then activate the more broad, analytical-creative part of your brain to match symbols or identify a pattern was a great change of pace and challenge in an otherwise pretty fast-paced shooter.

Despite the variety, though, the feel of moving and shooting wasn’t quite as satisfying as I’d like it to be. Hawked has a lot of movement abilities with its traversal tool letting you grapple, swing, and climb lots of points around the map—but it’s not always clear how you should approach them, and the experience of climbing or swinging upwards didn’t quite flow into movement the way I’d want it to. Guns had the opposite problem, perhaps a little too smooth without enough feedback to differentiate the types of weapons.

I’ll stick around to see how it changes and improves before and after release, because Hawked looks like it’ll be a great game for casual rounds before and after games with long playtimes. Need a quick break from something more hardcore, or only have a half hour to mess around with buddies? If the games are flowing freely, then Hawked will fill that gap with something satisfying that also has long-term progression to buy into.