Wargaming is big business these days thanks to the hugely successful World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, and visiting the team’s studio and seeing just how many extremely dedicated, personable and talented staff, from all corners of the globe, are working their hides off to finish Steel Hunters was impressive, not to mention humbling.
Steel Hunters is a forthcoming free to play PVP/extraction shooter based around huge, scenery-levelling mecha. Rather than just soulless robots, the mechs in Steel Hunters are imbued with a bit of personality and all have distinct characteristics, making the game more akin with the diverse lineups of characters in other titles like Overwatch or Fragpunk. Throughout the preview, staff repeatedly told us that Steel Hunters is all about “finding the fun”, and in the time I spent in its clutches I certainly had a lot of fun.
You play as one of seven types of Hunter in a six-team, third-person throwdown, with the aim either to complete extraction first, or survive, wiping out your opponents. Each game is a taut 10-15 minutes long, making it very accessible and not too time consuming and intimidating. There is even a cool sci-fi plot underpinning the action which explains how a catastrophic event has wiped out most of humanity, and fusing certain specially gifted humans with the Hunter Mechs is the only way to ensure the survival of our species.
The mech types are all really interesting to play as and all have different abilities and loadouts. There are also skill trees and progression to really pimp all of them out in a variety of aspects. Ursus is a huge bear-like robot that dashes around like an animal on all fours and can mix it up with some brawling grunt. Weaver is a creepy arachnid-modelled unit that is extremely fun to play as. The Heartbreaker resembles an Eldar from the Games Workshop universe and operates as a nimble sniper. Razorside is the heavy hitting space marine type of the bunch and packs some powerful machine-gun ordnance. The superbly named Trenchwalker is the combat medic, whilst the Prophet is the Steel Hunters’ equivalent of a summoner/spellcaster and evocative of some of the fantastical, magical characters in Destiny. Rounding out the bunch is the mech that proved to be my favourite – the “merciless prowler” Fenrir, a badass robotic wolf with a back-mounted cannon who could have been plucked straight out of the Transformers canon.
Steel Hunters is great fun to play and even for someone like me who is generally rubbish at hero shooter/extraction type games there is much to enjoy thanks to the sheer variety of mechs and how they all play so differently. It takes little elements from a lot of historic games I have played and enjoyed. A bit of Overwatch and Destiny here, a bit of Chromehounds and Armored Core there. When you enter the fray you begin by scavenging around for items, that buff your stats and power up your abilities (Dota/LoL style). There are NPC drones to take out for additional rewards, too. The game gives you objectives and little events pop up – this may be the chance to capture a particularly large and juicy loot crate, or a powerful drone that needs dealing with. And then of course there are the core objectives to attend to, all against the clock. There is a cool symbiosis system that means combinations of Hunters work effectively together. Team work makes the dream work as they say, and that has never been truer. Winning teams will be those that can combine their abilities and tactics effectively.
The superbly detailed maps are full of life and destructible elements. In fact, the graphics and presentation are uniformly great, from the superbly detailed galleries and biographies to the lush verdant post-apocalyptic countryside setting we played in. There are maps based on actual real life locations that the art design team are rightly very proud of, including one based upon places in England and Wales. As well as the rotting shells of buildings, rolling hills and flora there are lots of ledges and obstacles – and given that each mech has a limited amount of energy to execute jumps and dashes you have to ensure that these are well timed to make best use of the cooldown times and not get caught out. This was my only bugbear with Steel Hunters, as sometimes I found myself unable to get out of a sticky situation as the energy bar had not replenished.
The team spoke about how Steel Hunters intends to be accessible to all with a fair and balanced paid element that should not mean pay to win, nor should it penalise those who choose not to spend money on it. Whether this is truly the case remains to be seen, obviously, but those I spoke to were so passionate about it they had me wanting to play more.
Steel Hunters should be a huge success when it hits Steam early access, as it is doing something fresh with the genre and has a world and cast of characters that is genuinely interesting, diverse, and features archetypes that players will be familiar with and excited about playing. I look forward to this one dropping so I can kick some more anthropomorphic robotic ass soon.
Steel Hunters is coming to PC via Steam early access on April 2nd.
