Recent reviews by Pocket Lion

I couldn't even play 30 minutes of this trash. Bring back original Hawken. Whatever this game is, it's a complete disgrace and it would be horrendous even if you never played the original. Everything about this "game" is just god awful. There's nothing left of the old Hawken, this pile of steaming crap is only Hawken by name. There's actually nothing left of the old PvP FPS we used to love.

This game is great! I'll break it down by what I feel is important to consider before playing. Warning, wall of text:

It feels/looks like Halo but the TTK is faster and so is the movement. It feels somehow crisper than Halo though.

There is sprinting and jetpacks. The sprinting feels great and doesn't kill the gameplay- It feels right in here. The jetpacks are also far weaker than old Halo Reach jetpacks and are minimally invasive. In fact, I'd say they're more than tolerable and it adds another layer to the gameplay. Less a tool for fighting and more of a convenient solution to traversing the map, due to having a very slow get-go; You don't just thrust away at full speed immediately upon pressing the jetpack and floating will always make you a more predictable and easy target over the more sudden directional change of strafing left and right. In custom games, they can be made insanely effective and then it's just a mess.

Portals are a refreshingly fun mechanic to the gameplay. While they have proven to really confuse a lot of people, I find it simple and much more interesting. It takes time to get used to but you'll eventually have the portal thing down and gameplay changes significantly with proper game sense and experience.

Weapons: NOTE! I AM CONSIDERING MY WEAPON EVALUATION WITH PERFECT ACCURACY IN MIND! IF YOU'RE NOT LANDING CONSISTENT HEADSHOTS, YOU'RE BELOW THE CURVE!
BR is best at range and the Pistol is just a budget BR for when you don't have one. AR is good but the SMG is better in most every way, even mid-range engagements seem to favor the player that can land consistent headshots with the SMG.. Which is easier to aim with. So that needs adjustment. Shotgun is amazing but not as good as old Halo Shotguns, range-wise. Snipers are very effective but I seem to notice nobody tries to use them. The lack of aim assist must make it so less people want to go for them and pop those heads. Power weapons are power weapons (Rocket Launcher/Railgun), they kill fast, spawn only on the map (As long as you're not in a custom lobby with the spawn weapons changed), and are very fun but not too overbearing; Just enough to warrant the normal playstyle of controlling weapon spawns like the old Halos or any proper arena shooter.

People want to complain about the TTK, the AR balance, and the fact that a Pistol can be used as a primary instead of a backup/finisher weapon. These people are arguing that a "secondary weapon" should not be viable as a primary weapon choice. Imagine being that weird. Disregard the "secondary" concept and understand that this game was design to play well first and make sense later. Just because a pistol isn't seen as a viable primary weapon in other games does not make it a bad choice to not design its use that way. Break those chains, people. AR is a budget SMG (Because balancing here actually needs adjustment) and the Pistol is a budget BR. If you didn't spawn with a set of weapons that couldn't cover the ranges you want, you'd be screwed by map control too much. Pistol/AR starts, and having the choice to choose between either off spawn, is a great design choice for flexibility in gameplay without buffing either weapon to the point that we don't need certain map pickups anymore. Starting weapons are supposed to be inferior to map pickups. Otherwise, whats the point? Playstyle? Unfortunately, the truth is that you don't get playstyle variety if you buff the AR to match the Pistol/BR at range. You just get a weapon that competes with anything and then the question is, "which is easier to use?". Right now, BR dominates ranged fights, followed by the Pistol. SMG dominates close-to-mid range fights, followed by the AR. See the pattern here? It works and plays nicely, whether it makes logical sense or not. Give it a chance and stop whining about the Pistol being better than the AR at range. If it was to be a "realistic" AR design, we wouldn't use the BR or Pistol at all. Why? Because AR is more braindead and has a competitive TTK at that point. You just alienate weapons in the map and thusly, the game style of the Halo-esque gameplay the devs (And us Splitgate fans!) are after.

Maps tend to feel small. They are, and the added portal mechanic makes it just that much more small. While I personally am not bothered by this, many people seem to be. I understand this plight. Map size + portals + jetpacks and momentum conservation can truly make maps feel bad at times. The trick is to learn the maps in great detail. They were designed not to be chaotic but to be flexible. You'll learn to work them and handle opponents with amazing map movement/awareness. That may not make it feel better for you but hopefully you'll take that to heart and give the maps a fair shot. The more I play, the more I appreciate the choices made in sizing. Your movement speed, player size, and potential map traversal time is all taken into account so the tight spacing reigns in the potential insanity. It still gets crazy but it can all be very reasonable once you gain some experience and memorize a few critical details about the maps, utilizing them to your advantage.

My performance on a 1060 6gb GPU and an i7 5820k 3.30ghz CPU has been phenomenal. Had one crash early on and a weird bug that forced me out of matches before even the 1 minute mark (Restarting the game fixed this and I've been fine since). Otherwise, it's crispy, smooth, and runs at 144FPS on my rig with medium settings. I do medium to keep temps down, just a habit because I don't care about graphics very much.

CTF sucks in this game though. You do get most all of the vanilla gamemodes of the early Halos. No Griffball.

A little disjointed in my thoughts here but I wanted to talk about the things that I thought would be the first things most players might think about when evaluating a game on-the-fly.





In conclusion, I love the game and I'm having a blast tearing up scrubs. Come join us! Don't get mad! And bring your A-game!

This game is very fun. If you don't want to speedrun it, you don't have to. There is a mechanic to carry bodies of the bots to safe spots for hiding, so you can complete each level at your own pace this way. It still requires learning the maps and bot spawns/routes to some degree, but that's to be expected, right? There is an option in the options menu to enable "same spawns", making things a bit easier to memorize and there's no shame to using it. It's challenging no matter how you approach the game and presents very fun movement mechanics that the maps allow you to exploit and take to any extreme you wish. At later levels, you will be pushed in ways you really wouldn't expect. Complexity and size of the rooms, while the increase in the number of bots rise, become overwhelming and you'll need patience to figure out surprisingly thorough plans of attack. It's never impossible but I haven't just breezed through it by any means. Highly recommend you give it a try.

For the speedrunners:
Learn to boost-hop; Jump at the peak speed of your slide and you'll propel yourself forward. Combo that back into a slide, jump again at your peak speed, now you're boost-hopping. Change directions by turning your mouse during slides. Jump onto ramps and slide up them for a big speed boost. Jump off them at the right time for a bigger speed boost. Slide off ledges at the right time for a large speed increase. Wall-jumping wont kill your speed too badly. Knifing has an animation delay where all input is inactive (By design), making knifing-only runs not optimal for the fastest run.


Detailed feedback for the dev:
We shouldn't have to turn off things in the options menu like cutscenes and whatnot. Currently, these will start the level timer before you've spawned in as your character and that's not very intuitive to understand right-away. I have also felt like bots are spawning and moving before the player does on the very first spawn into a freshly loaded map; Please don't allow the bots to move until the player has spawned in and has full control of the character. Specifically in the second level, I have noticed certain bots will gain lines-of-sight that they don't always have and their movement is rendered unpredictable from time-to-time, due to having seen a body they normally don't see (Because of distance). Perhaps this is an error we can't fix but it would be greatly appreciated.