Hawked was an Extraction Shooter from My.Games, who also published games like Warface or Allods Online. The big twist of Hawked was its focus on PVE and in particular Treasure Hunting. You could say it was the Indiana Jones version of Extraction Shooters.
While in most Extraction Shooters you are only focused on collecting weapons and gear that you extract and sell after the match, in Hawked there was a big emphasis on exploring jungle ruins and solving puzzles instead. This is also what made the game stand out in the Extraction Shooter genre. Most of the puzzles were switch and lever puzzles, but there were also some combat challenges. Players needed to solve 3-5 puzzles to unlock glyphs around the map, which would allow you to retrieve a final artifact from a treasury. You then had to escort the artifact to an extraction site while other players were hunting you and trying to steal the artifact for themselves. During Season 3 of the live service, they removed the treasury and from now on hid the artifacts in a final Boss Dungeon instead.
The dungeons weren’t bad, but I always preferred the race to the extraction points instead. Extraction points still existed but became nearly obsolete now. Hawked was always an extraction shooter with a bigger emphasis on PVE than most games, but this change moved Hawked even further into that direction. I do like PVE, but I also believe a strong reason for this decision was the small playerbase of Hawked. During the Open Beta in late 2023 Hawked still had decent player numbers, but even in the first months after launch in early 2024 there was already a severe lack of players present. I encountered much fewer enemy teams during the matches and sometimes my own squads didn’t fill up anymore. It is nearly surprising that the game managed to last another 2,5 years before the inevitable server shutdown.
The lack of players definitely influenced the experience. Where previously you had to hurry up while solving the glyph puzzles, so that other teams didn’t get the chance to third party you and where you constantly had to look over your shoulder while trying to extract the artifact, this all changed without the human competition. While I enjoyed the intensity of these moments, it’s fair to point out that Hawked always had a smaller focus on this pure survival feeling than many other extraction shooters do. Apart from the PVE and Puzzle focus, the colorful comic-book art style probably contributed to this as well. Games like Hunt Showdown or Escape from Tarkov are dark in tone and visuals, while Hawked is a very vibrant game instead. That’s also why a lot of people referred to it as the Fortnite of Extraction Shooters.
There honestly isn’t all that much to say about the gameplay. Hawked was a third-person shooter and both gunplay and movement felt at least competent. If I had to choose, I would clearly give the edge to the movement, however. Sprinting, sliding and climbing animations were very fluent. There were special grappling and rope-swinging opportunities and you could use a hovering board for traversal on water. The gunplay was pretty decent as well, but weaker than in the best extraction shooters. Weapons could have used more impact and sometimes the hit registration just felt a bit off. Nothing too major, but nobody would have been drawn to Hawked because of the gunplay alone.
Hawked featured a large and beautiful Jungle map. It was a lot of fun to explore that map and to search for the glyph chambers and temples. Since the map was huge, you would only get to experience a certain part of it every match, which helped to keep things fresh for a while.
Hawked also had an underwater base as a hub area, where players could relax outside of matches. You could access different settings or functions, similar to many other games, but you could also talk there with NPCs to gather some equipment or progress some background story via cutscenes. While I do think it’s a positive part of the presentation that they included some kind of overarching narrative, it was very bland and forgettable and players who ignored it haven’t really missed out on anything.
In the beginning Hawked only featured regular monsters in the form of reptilians called ‘The Disciples’. Season 2 would add robotic aliens in the form of the ‘The Vektr’, while Season 3 provided us with new corrupted mutants. Each of these factions also had different gamemode queues to face them. I am not entirely sure if it was a good idea to divide the small playerbase even further with additional queues, but what do I know… The gamemodes to play against the Vektr and corrupted enemies were, btw, also paid DLC till the shutdown announcement of Hawked.
This feels like a good moment to also talk about P2W aspects in Hawked. While Hawked was not the most P2W game in the Extraction Shooter genre, it still had some really annoying elements. Players with an active Hawked subscription, called Grail+, not only progressed faster, but they also got an additional sub-exclusive loadout slot. Season 2 and Season 3, furthermore, introduced some of the best gear and abilities in the game and locked them behind a DLC paywall. Players could also pay to skip the grind for gear and boosters. Non paying players could get there too, but it required much longer time to become competitive. At least players in Hawked could never lose their once-unlocked weapons and gear, so there were no purchasable insurances, like in many other Extraction games.
Result:
The Treasure Hunting focus gave Hawked a unique position inside the Extraction Shooter genre. It was a good game and fun for a couple of hours, but it’s also fair to say that Hawked never achieved greatness. The best moments were when you got caught in between solving puzzles, extracting artifacts and fighting off other squads. The game, however, suffered from a lack of players pretty early on, which only sped up its downfall. The art style was controversial, the gunplay nothing special and the story was very shallow and forgettable. P2W aspects like a subscription-exclusive gear slot or gear locked behind paywalls prevented the game from ever attempting a comeback. I liked Hawked, but I also understand why it didn’t succeed in a highly competitive market.
7/10
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