Hawked Review – Guest Review by Ellery Woods Parker III

The following review for Hawked, is a guest review by the very talented Ellery Woods Parker III. At Complete Xbox, we always welcome your views, and we love to share and promote them within the wider gaming community.

Bottom Line Up Front

If Fortnite had an extraction aspect with a present-day Indiana Jones comic vibe—you’ve got yourself Hawked!  The bite-sized game lengths allow for a quick run when time is short, but good luck playing only one round! Balancing the objectives of extracting trinkets and artifacts while trying not to die makes for a fun gameplay loop. But that isn’t all there is to accomplish on X-Isle. Pick and choose which objectives you’d like to focus on to curate your experience.

With their 2024 roadmap released and consistent updates, this game doesn’t look like it is slowing down anytime soon!

BLUF: RECOMMENDED

Description:  Hawked, The Ultimate Treasure Hunt

On the surface, Hawked is a free-to-play extraction shooter that takes place on X-Isle. You are a Renegade employed by Grail tasked with collecting Glyphs, using them to unlock the Treasury, and extracting the Artifact housed inside…all without getting killed by the Disciples of the island or other players. But that is not all there is to do.  You can focus on daily, weekly, and/or stage quests to snag Renegade Pass rewards. Battle Pass not your thing?

Not to worry, Hawked has you covered. There are story objectives that allow you to further engage with the NPCs of Grail and the isle as well as contracts to fulfill that are tied to different tiered leagues.

Gameplay Mechanics

Combat:

Shooting feels smooth and responsive which you can test out in the shooting range via the lobby. This not only allows you to practice and determine what weapons you like the best (mine are the Mazzikin and Goodfella), but you can also check out the personal mods and consumables available in X-Isle (a great tutorial of sorts for new players).

Melee feels a bit sluggish and heavy. Unless I run out of ammo, am in close combat, or am trying to knock out a melee objective, I tend not to use it due to feeling clunky.

Traversing:

You can move around X-isle by way of walking/running (land travel), hoverboarding (water travel), or ziplining (air travel). No form of travel gets too monotonous since there are so many areas of interest near by (no matter where you are on the map).

Objectives: 

These come in many forms—quests, contracts, and story.

• Quests (daily, weekly, and staged): Completion of these quests progresses the Renegade Pass and unlocks rewards.  The pass goes up to level 50 (14 of which are available in the free pass).  For the full slew of items available, you will have to drop ~$25.  Overtime, you do have the ability to earn GE-0 cash in-game (the currency used to buy the pass), but it won’t be a fast process.  Luckily, the premium pass drops cosmetics only which means all players–regardless if they have spent money or not–are on the same playing field.
• Contracts: Contracts are unlocked as you progress through the story.  All objectives here are focused on Disciples and other players.  This is ideal for the competitive bunch as completion moves you up on the leaderboard and gives you the ability to join higher tiered leagues (which means better rewards).
• Story: I was not expecting a story quest line, so this was quite the pleasant surprise. Looking at the roadmap for this year and the next three issues (aka seasons), you might get a glimpse of where the story could go.  The first issue does a good job of “on-boarding” you as a Renegade and introducing you to the world.  The story isn’t overwhelming great or captivating, but it’s fun, and I realized that is exactly what I want in this type of game.  If you are a fan of lore, this questline is a must-play!

Gameplay Loop

The replay-ability of this games is great in large part due to the ability of choosing different objectives each time you jump into X-Isle. Need a break from solving Glyph puzzles and extracting Artifacts? You can switch your attention to the story and complete objectives like scanning ancient art or helping embed a spy in the Disciples’ strongholds.

The puzzles can get repetitive, so having a handful of other objectives available keeps the gameplay loop fresh and had my “one more run” turn into 3 hours quite often!

For those of you that like consistency and would rather grind out those extractions time and time again, you get randomly assigned a location on X-Isle, so no run is ever the same.

Leveling Up/Skills/Abilities

Leveling up comes in 3 forms: Artifacts, Gears, and Boosters. Each of these have a handful of options that can all be upgraded. Any of these can be swapped out at any time, so you are never locked into a build. All items enhance your utility, survival, or hunting ability giving you customization based on your play style.

Accessibility

Most games have ample opportunity to improve when it comes to making games for all types of people. Hawked is no different. That said, I will highlight some of the accessibility features I appreciated.

• Notification of another player or a stash is accomplished by multiple means: The player is clued into this by voice narration by your character or one of the other NPCs, visual comic-like images via your player’s traverser, and a sound made by your traverser.
• You are provided a GPS-like guidance system on your map of the next closest area of interest (i.e. glyph or caravan location).
• Although there’s no difficulty settings, in the most recent update (1.3.2), the PVE solo and squad modes now have dynamic scaling difficulty depending on your skill level.

Other

• Art Style/Character Customization

This art style is heavily inspired by two things: comics and Fortnite.  What separates it, though, is the character customization. While not super robust, it does provide a handful of options ranging from skin color to hair style and more.

The art style fits perfectly with the vibe of the game and a great choice by the Devs.

• Audio
  • Sound Design

My initial impression was the sound design is “good enough.” To test this feeling, I played with the SFX volume at zero.  What I realized is that there are some subtleties I didn’t appreciate until I completely turned the sound effects off one run and on for the next.

• Score/OST

This is one of the weaker parts of the game. I have only heard a few different tracks. While I dug each one, the lack of options could be a huge bummer for some if you don’t vibe with the music. For those that aren’t into it, they have the option to turn it down or off.

• Voice Acting

The NPCs each have unique personalities that are captured wonderfully by the voice actors which enhances the immersion of the story.

Summary:

While the game is still navigating through new game bugs and server issues, there is no doubt this game is a ton of fun to play. As this is a free-to-play game available on all platforms, there is no reason not to give it a try.

Written by Ellery Woods Parker III