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Free-to-play mech FPS Hawken is staging a fan-led comeback thanks to a new project called Hawakening. It's certainly not the first effort to bring Hawken back to life, but after the ill-received Hawken Reborn took the game in a whole different direction, this unofficial revival might just be what the fandom truly needs.
"Hawakening is a community effort to bring multiplayer back to life for the defunct CL142579 build of HAWKEN™," as explained on the project's website. "We have made this possible through cleanroom reverse-engineering, injecting our own code into the client and writing our own infrastructure from scratch. It is a labor of undying love. Our servers are self-hosted. We will never monetize anything."
This might sound familiar to Hawken superfans - after all, Hawakening first launched way back in 2020. But that was a single-player revival intended to let players get back in to play with bots. This new relaunch is a full custom server job letting you play PvP online. This is, to be clear, a beta, and on Discord the devs warn that progress might be wiped at the 1.0 launch, particularly since they're still deciding what progression looks like in a now microtransaction-free revival of a formerly free-to-play game.
PC servers for Hawken shut down back in 2018, though the game has remained playable online with admittedly dwindling player bases on Xbox One and PS4. An official sequel called Hawken Reborn launched in 2023, but it was pretty much immediately skewered for adding a pay-to-win cash shop - plus it was a PvE game that got away from the PvP action the original fandom loved. Steam reviews for the sequel remain "mostly negative," but it did get a new update on September 24. It reached a total of 25 concurrent players on Steam following that update.
The Hawakening devs eventually plan to take the project open source, as it's "the key to making Hawken truly immortal." But, they add, that "will take additional time, effort & considerations." In the meantime, it looks like the Hawken fans actually want to play is well and truly back.
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