Hawken, the free-to-play PC mech shooter has been in a bit of a pickle for some time now. The game was developed by Adhesive Games, who have been pretty quiet for the last few months. It seemed that support for Hawken was coming to an end, as password resets, forum functionality and game updates were completely stalled. So you can imagine our surprise when Joshua Clausen of Reloaded Games delivered the following announcement on Facebook:

“I’m pretty excited to *now* be able to announce that Reloaded Games is the new owner of Hawken .It’s a seriously great honor to be a part of the Hawken story, and I want to see it thrive .Once the forums are up we will post more information (they’ve been taking a lot longer than I was hoping).”

In a nutshell, Reloaded Games plan to:

• Fix password reset
• Fix more deployment stuff
• Fix a bunch of tool sytems
• Plan new updates and futuure changes
• Get forums working again
• Fix more backend systems

An interesting, if somewhat vague list. It seems that Hawken might live to shoot another day. And that can only be good for all of us, as nothing goes together quite as well as giant mechs and giant guns.

There are many topics of debate in the gaming industry, and one of the biggest is the issue of piracy and how best to combat it. Some studios will use methods such as CD keys to combat it, while other games get programmed with hidden bonuses that trigger if a game is pirated and makes the game difficult or impossible to play. Paradox though plan to cut down on piracy for their new city-builder game Cities: Skylines simply by regularly updating it over Steam for free so often that it will always be more up to date than any cracked version.

This stance on tackling piracy was outlined by Paradox’s VP of Acquisition, Shams Jorjani, who spent a few hours last week clarifying it. He pointed out that services such as Netflix were so popular even in an age where if you look hard enough online you can find most programs available for free, simply because it offered a fair service that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Paradox previously used this update strategy with Arrowhead Games’ Magicka.

Since this, Jorjani has had tweets from people who may or may not have pirated the game who appreciated not being branded as hated criminals and enjoyed the game so much that they soon all went to actually buy it so they could get access to the regular free updates that were being offered by Paradox. Also of interest is the amount of people who said that they originally pirated the game purely because they had been burned before by the launches of games like SimCity, not wanting to waste money on what could potentially be another letdown.

HELLO EVERYONE NEKOKITWOLF HERE TALKING ABOUT LA COP

It’s a 3-d top down shooter much like Hotline Miami. With the art style of classic American Pop art also in the style of 80’s cop-shows and yes they come with handle bar mustaches. There are 13 levels and 6 cops to choose from which is quite diverse. With the music style of rock from that era.

Currently available on STEAM Early Access and on XBox One

Opinion: The Art style in my opinion isn’t something I like though the bright and vibrant colors are quite appealing. And what little gameplay I saw wasn’t that impressive to me mostly because it looked like Hotline Miami. What caught my attention though is that we saw co-op which would be something different and nice in this day in age. To bad it seems to only be local, a small lost opportunity there. And the early access version on steam doesn’t have co-op but I’m sure in future installments it’ll be added. All and all this game doesn’t grab me but if you did dig games in that top down style then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this one.

With EGX Rezzed  in full swing, one of the panels I was interested in today was Titan Souls. Being developed by Acid Nerve and published by Devolver Digital, the game places you in the shoes of a tiny pixel hero armed with a bow and one arrow. Your goal is to take down the titular titans. Every fight is a boss fight, pitting you against a foe with only one hit point. Giving a presentation at EGX, they talked a bit about the design philosophy of the game, as well as  demonstrating some of the boss fights.

Interestingly, they revealed that they would gauge the balance of a boss by how many times testers died before beating it. They also expanded a bit upon the idea behind the single hit boss fights, discussing how they wanted it to be relatively easy to remain alive during a fight, but difficult to actually win the fight.  This was, of course, accompanied by a gameplay demo- which ended in a few unfortunate deaths for the devs.

With an obvious attention to detail, gorgeous art style and unique one shot, one HP mechanic, Titan Souls is looking better than ever. Keep an eye out for this game when it releases simultaneously on PS4, PS Vita, PC and Mac.

505 Games, a global publisher of video games, Overkill, a Starbreeze Studio, and film director Demian Lichtenstein brings you the live-action PAYDAY web series.

 

Director Demian Lichtenstein, of “3000 Miles to Graceland” commented, “The PAYDAY web series has been a solid and very close collaboration between all parties involved. I have never experienced such a high level of commitment to excellence from PAYDAY creators Bo and Ulf Andersson, to the rock-solid input of game director David Goldfarb, and the combined efforts of the powerhouse global teams at 505 Games, Starbreeze, Overkill, Solaris, Equilibrium and Lightstone. Simply said, this is the best experience of my career.”

 

Executive produced by Greg O’Connor of “Warrior” and “Pride and Glory” fame, the web series was filmed on location in Los Angeles with a crew of over 100 and sets the scene for the next steps in the evolution of the PAYDAY story.

The series can be watched live on your PC or Downloaded, episode by episode to watch how and when you want

We’ll have a full review later this week