Taking a break from all the real world war machines and historical battling, Wargaming’s next foray is a full-on sci-fi mech battler. Steel Hunters is launching into Early Access on 2nd April, with Wargaming aiming to push ahead for a full 1.0 launch in relatively short order. We’ve been hands on with the game ahead of time.
Steel Hunters is a pretty fun time. Sure, my opinion might be coloured by going completely undefeated while visiting Wargaming’s team, DPS Games in Guildford, and that fact would have been skewed by largely playing against bots while being paired up with very experienced play testers, but I can only imagine that it would still be fun even if I’d lost a few times?
A huge part of that enjoyment is found in the Hunters themselves. There’s a broad variety of designs, from fairly standard bipedal soldier-y types, to lithe snipers and hovering drone-summoning support, but the stars of the show are the animalistic designs, with spiders, bears and dogs all represented in the initial line up of styles. They feel like legally distinct Zoids, since the narrative is that these towering robots have been implanted with human consciousness, rather than having pilots or being AI. Not that it really matters once you start to smash them together like robot action figures – actually a rather apt comparison, when seeing how the models have been constructed out of dozens, if not hundreds of individual parts.
There’s good, strong contrast between each character and their roles. Razorside is one of two basic all-rounders with a standard assault rifle, while Heartbreaker is the sniper, with stealth abilities to improve their escapability. It really is the animal designs that shine, though. Ursus is the bear-like bot, with a close range shotgun and tough ice armour ability to reward you with getting in close, while Fenris is speedier, comes with energy abilities to quickly close range and drop a ball of damaging energy – this quickly became my favourite character for chasing down fleeing opponents after knocking their shields, and then finishing them at close range.
Each Hunter has both a fairly lengthy skill tree of unlocks to boost power a few percentage points and tweak their abilities, as well as a suite of Mods and Gear to unlock and choose between. Razorside can mod his Assault Rifle, for example, to switch between a fully automatic and burst firing modes.
Taking them into battle, DPS Games has struck a fine balance between size, heft and speed. Coming in at around 8 meters tall, you’re the size of a mature tree, big enough to smash through buildings with ease – literally just walk at them fast enough and they’ll get out the way – and the three maps in the game so far do a great job of selling that sense of scale. There’s a real feel of being a big and heavy machine with the default walking speeds, but you’re much more mobile than that, really. There’s perfect responsiveness to quick looking around with mouse & keyboard, and sprinting just tips the pace from the “realistically stompy” end of the scale to the “fast, but more fun” side. That contrasts strongly with the slow rate of weapon reloading, which forces you to play tactically, even at full speed.
Steel Hunters will launch into Early Access with one game mode called Last Stand, a light riff on ideas from the battle royale and extraction shooter genres. You drop in at the start of the match with six pairs of Hunters spaced evenly around the map, with the early goal being to quickly find and harvest resources from fairly mindless drones nearby. Given the initial spacing and nearby points of interest, it’s pretty likely that you’ll run into one of the neighbouring duos quite quickly, giving that early game combat to help whittle down the field.
You’re fairly underpowered at this point with just the base abilities of your character and without having ramped up your stats with the ultra-simplistic looting. In addition to ammo and repair kits, Drones and caches will drop triangular, diamond and circular stat boosts to increase your structural health, shields and damage output. They come in the standard looting colours – white, green, blue and purple – and I appreciate just how straightforward grabbing them is. You can have two of each type, and you can see what your partner has equipped in the UI, making the judgement calls on what to grab or what to share as simple as glancing at the bottom corner of the screen.
After the first few minutes, a simple objective pops up, typically heading to a zone where high value and more aggressive drones are about to spawn in. The potential rewards are increased here, but so too is the chance of bumping into other teams as the objective draws players together. Eventually, it’s all brought to a head by a timed extraction, tasking you with reaching the point on the map and capturing and holding out for two minutes. It’s that last ditch chance for any surviving teams to butt heads, leading either to a successful extraction or a team winning by being the last ones standing.
It’s short, it’s pithy, it’s effective. Last Stand matches doesn’t last all that long – maybe 20 minutes or so – and the pace is kept up by the straightforward goals of quickly levelling, grabbing power boosts and then facing off in that final stage. DPS is working on further game modes that will layer in further ideas on this format – Starfall Harvest is a mode that was originally meant for launch, but needs a little more time to be refined – and down the line there could easily be modes that mix up team sizes, objectives and everything else.
Looking to hit the ground and get stomping, Steel Hunters will start off with no monetisation in Early Access. Only once Wargaming and DPS are happy with the game’s progress and potential will they start to introduce monetisation and push for a 1.0 launch, but there’s already a planned rollout of content through the first couple of months. April will be Season 0 with Season 1 coming in May and bringing new hunters to the table. There’s also plans to adjust the UI, HUD, the overarching Hunter progression and more in tandem with early player feedback.
The most important thing is that the core of the game already feels solid, and that there’s some great Hunter designs with really strong contrasts in their gameplay and tactical combat potential. Now, the only question is, do I risk my 100% record when the game is opened to the masses?
