After the official revival of a cult classic mech FPS spent a year getting skewered by "mostly negative" Steam reviews, fans have relaunched the old game themselves

Oct. 2, 2024

“It is a labor of undying love”

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Free-to-play mech FPS Hawken is staging a fan-led comeback thanks to a new project called Hawakening. It’s certainly not the first effort to bring Hawken back to life, but after the ill-received Hawken Reborn took the game in a whole different direction, this unofficial revival might just be what the fandom truly needs.

“Hawakening is a community effort to bring multiplayer back to life for the defunct CL142579 build of HAWKEN™,” as explained on theproject’s website. “We have made this possible through cleanroom reverse-engineering, injecting our own code into the client and writing our own infrastructure from scratch. It is a labor of undying love. Our servers are self-hosted. We will never monetize anything.”

The Hawakening devs eventually plan to take the project open source, as it’s “the key to making Hawken truly immortal.” But, they add, that “will take additional time, effort & considerations.” In the meantime, it looks like the Hawken fans actually want to play is well and truly back.

Check out all thebest FPS gamesavailable today.

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

A month after approving free versions of Unreal games that “started it all,” Fortnite creator Epic shouts out a group of fan devs “for their continued support in keeping the legacy alive”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 makes headshots deadlier while cutting back on weapon sway and recoil: “We will be keeping a close eye on sniper balance after this change”