Wargaming’s latest free-to-play shooter has some exciting tactical potential, but its loot game is too lightweight.
Less than a minute remains on Steel Hunters‘ countdown clock when the last surviving pair of Hunters lumber into view, rolling over a hilltop toward the same extraction point my own team waits at. Even across a half-mile of desolate wasteland pocked by buildings, I can tell they are Weaver, a mechanical spider armed with a chaingun, and Razorside, who wouldn’t be out of place in Call of Duty: Warzone, were it not for the fact he is eight metres tall.
My own Hunter, a floating purple humanoid mech named Prophet, is armed with a sort-of railgun that does massive damage when its shot is fully charged. Indeed, a few well-aimed shots makes short work of Razorside and rips through the deployable energy shield Weaver can generate. But the canny arachnid dips behind a building for cover, where it can repair and, provided it can hold out long enough, wait for its teammate to respawn.Nerves of steel
It’s a smart move. Or it would be, were it not for the fact that I just unlocked an ability called Strike Vengeance. On triggering this, my Hunter launches itself into the air, darkening the sky as it unleashes a barrage of missiles at a target painted by me. The missiles obliterate the building Weaver huddles behind, and does heavy damage to the spider as it scuttles away in retreat. More than enough for my own teammate, another Razorside, to finish it off with ease.
This encounter, the last of my hands-on session with Steel Hunters, epitomises the kind of battles that Wargaming’s UK studio DPS Games hopes to generate in its free-to-play extraction shooter. Blending hero-style abilities with destructible, open-ended maps, the tactical potential of its third-person combat grew more evident with each game I played. But I’m less convinced by Steel Hunters‘ characterisation of an extraction shooter, mainly because it never felt like there was anything particularly worth extracting.
Let’s rewind a bit. Steel Hunters is the latest recruit into Wargaming’s growing army of free-to-play multiplayer titles, which started with World of Tanks and expanded with the underwhelming World of Warplanes and the deceptively popular World of Warships. According to creative director Sergey Titarenko, Steel Hunters was initially envisioned as a fourth companion to these games, essentially World of Mechs.
„Originally we had on paper in an early research and development phase, mechs, bipedal, chicken-like creatures with weapons [and] pilots“ Titarenko says. However, initial testing of this idea quickly presented a problem. „It was difficult for us and for the players to really ID and memorise what it can do against me, who is this exactly?“
Instead, DPS took a cue from hero shooters, reenvisioning these mechs as more distinctive, individualistic war machines that do not have a pilot, but are instead infused with the soul of a human, enabling them to have a personality. „It’s more mass market, but it’s more definitive in terms of visual identification and attribution. If you see a bear [mech], you have an expectation it will act like a bear [mech]“, Titarenko says. This approach comes with other bonuses too, like making it easier to tell stories about these characters across the game’s live-service duration.
At the same time, DPS also wanted to explore a broader game mode than the rapid-fire multiplayer matches seen in Wargaming’s other free-to-play titles, settling on an extraction shooter model.
