Hawked Impressions

Warning: there is some pretty unpleasant language in the review below but I think it is important to continue this conversation, especially in light of the most recent Kotaku article about sexism in Valorant.

Is this a review? Sure, I’ll do my best. Is this not a review? It is an experience of a Free-to-Play title that is heavily reliant on community cooperation exhibiting the worst elements of that player base.

Alright, I’ve done my due diligence. Let’s get on with talking about Hawked.

Hawked is a 1 or 3 player co-op extraction shooter that borrows heavily from a lot of other games. Unlike another game I reviewed, I found that all of Hawked’s influences coalesce in way to give it a personality of its own. It has borrowed its visual style from Fortnite, while its movement and traversal is closer to Apex Legends. Its main game loop – moving into an area, extracting good gear and loot and trying not to die – reminds me of The Division’s Dark Zone with the same recoil/heftiness to the shooting.

This Frankenstein’s Monster of design should feel discombobulated but it isn’t, thanks to a coherent visual style and narrative. The player is cast as an adventurer dropping on a planet full of treasure. It is inhabited by a bunch of lizard people that will fight the player (the game goes to great pains to stress that the alien reptiles are not indigenous to the planet) as well as other adventurers trying to steal the same loot. The colour supports this bright and breezy nature, with players bouncing around on grappling hooks and zipping through adventures.

Every run starts with a scramble for loot with weapons and temporary buffs like extra armour. Once a team is feeling confident they will move to a series of puzzle areas to gain hieroglyphics that will unlock the main prize. Along the way the player can get currency and trinkets. They can go to extraction points and send off trinkets, if they manage to extract themselves the currency comes with them. Dying while carrying either means they lose everything but the permanent upgrades.

When playing in co-op there are respawn points that can be used by surviving members to bring back downed teammates, and some items that will allow for instant revives.

There is a good balance of risk/reward but also a sense of playing badly doesn’t mean that it is time wasted if you extract early and exchange trinkets currency that can be spent on upgrades.

There is definitely a sense of play to win here as trinkets can be ground down for 2 of 3 currencies to be able to improve the player’s selection of artifacts, or specials. They confer things like extra armour when aiming down sights, or moving faster when no weapons are in hand.  None of them mean that a player has an overwhelming advantage but there are definitely some artifacts that can be attached (and kept between plays) that will give experienced players the edge. Especially PC players who have mechanical advantages over controllers, the use of sliding and jumping exists on another level on that platform and the added bonuses make it harder to pin those players down.

Still, the game can be really fun even if there has to be an acknowledgement from console players that they are almost always going to be outgunned (I’ve seen a single PC player take on 3 console players and win).

Hawked features the full suite of battle pass content, daily and weekly challenges and it has enough reasons to get people to come back and keep playing. I was having enough fun in the beginning to want to invest in the game but found the battle pass content prohibitively expensive, and the customisation options were weirdly priced and locked into specific genders. Too many of the coolest ones were for men, and I was committed to playing as a woman.

Alright, let’s talk about the community.

Now, I am not saying all of them. I became friends with a guy about my age – currently debilitated by needing to be on dialysis – he uses Xbox Live as a means of reaching out to others and just shooting things in the face. I talked with him about his life as we used our grappling hooks and raided caravans and searched for trinkets. But after he first invited me to an Xbox Live party I avoided him. This was because of my previous experiences.

At the beginning of the game, it warns you that if you talk others from other platforms will be able to hear you. Hawked offers the option to switch this off, but what it doesn’t explain is that others will still be able to freely talk through your TV, even if they cannot hear you.

My first bad experience was a ‘friendly’ adult playing in my 3-player team, he spoke to the other teammate (an obvious child) and referred to every enemy player as a F****t and/or a R****d. It was weird to just listen to this person ingratiate himself with an obviously young person and listening to them nervously laugh along with every comment. Intentionally dropping out of a match means losing loot, and the boosters that you paid for. I can understand why this was done to punish quitters, but it also meant that game held me hostage.

The pinnacle of this kind of behaviour was playing with two PC players. There are buried items that can be found throughout the world that involve following a ping system. I found something and another player ran over and dug it up, immediately picking up the high value gun. I shrugged and picked up the trinket that also emerged. Now, I want to stress, when you extract a trinket, everyone in your team gets that trinket. Not trying to counter point what was then said with ‘facts’ it just led to it feeing even more bizarre.

As I picked up the trinket an American voice chimed out over my TV:

‘Listen you Monkey, pick up my loot again and I will fucking lynch you.’

To give this proper context – my character is a Black woman.

It sucked the air of the room, and shook me. I want to say there was some redemptive story (again warning racist language in that link) I could append to this. But the reality was that mouse and keyboard have an advantage. The same player referred to me later as a ‘Console R****d’ and as he and his friend laughed about it, I got killed by another team and was not revived.

My wife asked me why I didn’t just quit immediately, and I am ashamed that I put up with this abuse for the sake of not losing fake money.

I can’t claim complete innocence – I’ve cussed people out in Rogue Company after they annoyed me in a public channel – but the kind of casual bigotry that Hawked enabled chilled me. I had opted out of communicating but those that wanted to impose their opinions on others had free reign to do so.

Am I still playing Hawked? I am. I’d even say that if you can find the good people in the game, or have like minded friends, Hawked is a great alternative to the other big Free-to-play stuff out there.

Except, well, the community really makes sure you don’t want to interact with them.

Conclusion

A game brimming with potential, and bigoted, crappy players

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version.
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Written by
AJ Small is a games industry veteran, starting in QA back in 2004. He currently walks the earth in search of the tastiest/seediest drinking holes as part of his attempt to tell every single person on the planet that Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine are the greatest games ever made. He can be found on twitter (@badgercommander), where he welcomes screenshots of Dreamcast games and talk about Mindjack, just don’t mention that one time he was in Canada.

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