Steel Hunters early access hands-on preview – hero shooter in disguise
GameCentral gets to play Steel Hunters, another new live service game focusing on giant robots, but this time from the publisher of World Of Tanks.
GameCentral gets to play Steel Hunters, another new live service game focusing on giant robots, but this time from the publisher of World Of Tanks.
If we had a pound for every time a free-to-play, multiplayer game with giant robots got announced we’d have two pounds, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice in such quick succession. However, since giant robots are one of our favourite things, outside of video games, we’re certainly not complaining, especially as both Mecha Break and Steel Hunters seem to be very good.
We first saw Mecha Break at Gamescom last year and, as robot fans, it’s very obvious, in terms of both gameplay and visuals, that it’s made in Asia, with a Chinese developer and a lot of Japanese mech designers. Its beta has been a huge success so far and we enjoyed it a lot when we got an extended playtest with it last month.
At the same time, it’s equally obvious that Steel Hunters is a Western made game, again in terms of both its gameplay and its robot designs. It’s the new title from World Of Tanks maker Wargaming and the fact that it is so different to Mecha Break is definitely a positive. Especially as, while it borrows a lot from hero shooters like Overwatch, it’s also quite distinctive in that regard too.
Steel Hunters is essentially a third person hero shooter. The robots you’re controlling are inhabited by the digitised minds of former humans, in a post-apocalyptic world. So they’re sentient creatures, like Transformers, and not piloted machines, like Gundam. We’re not sure we were particularly taken by the various wisecracks, and attempts to give them recognisable personalities, but there was nothing too obnoxious.
There is a backstory to everything but as a multiplayer-only game it doesn’t seem terribly important. What is, is the fact that the game currently only has one main mode, which is a blend of battle royale and extraction, although not really that similar to either. You play in duos, with a single computer or human controlled ally, against up to five other teams.
Your goal is a little nebulous but you’re all trying to collect an alien resource called Starfall, while also knocking out the other teams. As long as there’s one person left in a duo they can bring the other back, but if they’re both downed within the same window then they’re out of the match. In the last few minutes of a round everyone left standing has to go to a single extraction point, to try and nab extra Starfall, as the map shrinks in the style of a battle royale.
We say the goals are nebulous because we never spent much time trying to pick up Starfall and we don’t think anyone else did either, because it’s much more fun to just fight with the other teams. Which we’d say was a good sign.
There’s lots of computer-controlled drones (literally, they’re very boringly designed machines hovering above the ground) wandering about the very large maps but while they’re not much fun to fight they are good target practice and drop useful loot. You want to get as much loot as quickly as possible, to try and level up and gain useful buffs before going after human players – the defeat of which provides even more loot, as do crates dropped from space.
One of the first questions we had about the game is why isn’t it just called World Of Robots or World Of Mechs, or some such. We suspect the primary reason is that the audience for other World Of games skews considerably older than most other live service games, and so Wargaming are gunning for a younger audience with this, but creative director Sergey Titarenko offered some other reasons:
‘The thing is, ‘World Of’ comes with a legacy and expectations and it’s not necessarily the World Of game we wanted to make. We wanted the opposite, as although it’s very much rooted in the legacy of tanks and ships we wanted to drift away from being a vehicle shooter game.
‘We decided that we don’t want to build a game about mechs, per se. For various reasons, for visual identification – the traditional mech genre is building a line of very lookalike characters, where it is hard to know what to expect from your enemy. So we went for very simple visual archetypes.’
Humanoid characters like Razorside barely look like robots (Wargaming)The question of whether to make the robots pilotable mechs or sentient creatures has been a core part of the design process and has clearly influenced a lot beyond just the visuals.
‘We wanted an emotional connection, because we are trying to make a hero shooter we want players to care more about what they play,’ says Titarenko.
‘So what you see on screen is what you play as, not someone sitting inside a mechanical creature. So early on we rebooted our visual and art direction, and we started to make something that looked more like Transformers. These are almost human beings. They are now steel and metal, but they have a soul and a personality, each of them – and a bio and a back story.
‘Visually we explored a lot, in our team we have lots of different personalities and preferences. There was a clash, a creative fight: should we lean towards more Asian and Japanese designs? But we thought we would be repeating existing designs so much that we wanted to create something that stands out more and appeals more to a Western audience.’
The obvious starter robot is Razorside, who is your typical all-rounder and the equivalent of someone like Soldier: 76 from Overwatch. He looks like Doomguy in giant robot form and his specials are very straightforward things like grenades, but that means you can instantly get into the action – whether you have any special affinity for giant robots or not.
One reason robot games aren’t more common is that a lot of the time they tend to be portrayed as slow and lumbering, despite that not being how they are in the majority of anime. That approach is more common in Western media but what impresses about Steel Hunters is that they’re all fast and manoeuvrable but still have an impressive sense of size and weight.
Giant robot games, even something as renowned as Armored Core 6, are very bad at emphasising a sense of scale, but despite some mediocre robot designs Steel Hunters manages it very well. The three maps so far are all open ground, with a few villages and industrial areas, but you can smash through any building with minimal trouble. Although trying to use them for cover is probably the better idea.
There are seven robots, referred to as Hunters, at launch, four humanoid ones and three based on animals. The human ones are where the similarities to Overwatch became a little too obvious, with a sniperbot called Heartbreaker, who’s also female and just looks like Widowmaker wearing robotic armour.
Prophet, who we didn’t play as but whose main gimmick is a deployable drone, is even wearing a coat, for some reason. Trenchwalker, the healer, looks a bit more robotic, but only in comparison, in what are disappointingly bland designs that we hope can be improved upon with new skins.
The animal robots are more interesting though and while the Zoids influence is subtle you can see it. After getting to grips with the game’s basics with Razorside we then tried out Ursus the bear-like Hunter, who has a rage mode that activates heat-seeking missiles. We thought they might be a bit slow and lumbering but at the moment all the Hunters move at the same speed (and have the same strength melee), although some have buffs that can modify that further.
That seems a bit odd, and the developers indicated it could change in time, but as it is we found a team-up between Ursus up close and Heartbreaker at long range worked very well and after a few failed matches we started to consistently win, which was very gratifying.
Most of our matches devolved into deathmatches, which we were perfectly fine with (Wargaming)We particularly liked the purposefully slow time to kill for all the Hunters, which also helps to emphasise the fact that they’re a honking great robot. You can take quite a bit of damage before keeling over and if you’re sensible enough to retreat and bring back your shields you can end up lasting quite some time, even against experienced competition (although we assume the devs and testers we were playing against were pulling their punches most of the time).
In terms of gameplay our only real complaint is that the melee action is very poor. You have to be standing right next to an enemy to make contact and the long slowdown between punches feels very artificial and frustrating.
The developers already acknowledge this though and we’re sure changes will be made fairly quickly. Our other concern was that after a few hours we’d already started to get the hang of things and began to worry exactly how much depth there is to the game. Each Hunter only has a few different abilities and the unlockable skill trees are all just stat changes, which isn’t terribly exciting.
It’s not like Overwatch or other hero shooters have a lot more character mechanics, but they do tend to be more distinctive. Although we also played a bit with Weaver, who is a spider-like bot and has a deployable energy shield, which is very versatile from a tactical perspective.
The best and simplest test for any kind of hands-on is whether you’re upset when it ends and we were very loath to stop playing, especially before we’d had a proper go with all the other Hunters (Fenris the wolf would’ve been our next one).
Releasing any new live service game is definitely a risk at the moment, as Sony will certainly tell you, but publishing director Dan Tanasescu seems sensibly pragmatic about the situation.
‘Our approach is to really listen to the players. We shouldn’t think we know better than the players. No, the players know what they want. In the end we don’t make this game for ourselves, we make it for the players,’ he says.
‘2024 was crazy for the games industry. Over the entire library of Steam, 20% of it was launched in 2024. But only 14% of the Steam userbase played new games, the rest just played old games.’ [Actually, it’s even less than that – GC]
‘Players want something that is very well established and which gets frequent updates, so that’s what we want to give them. By the time we are at version 1.0 we want players to think, ‘This is the game I actually wanted to play, and I will stick to it.’ Obviously, we want to be successful but we also want to be realistic in terms of the level success.’
We suggest that, despite what some publishers seem to think, it’s fine to just be second, which Tanasescu readily agrees to. ‘Exactly! It’s completely fine if we don’t have 70 million players daily, we know this.
Steel Hunters won’t have any monetisation when it enters early access on Wednesday, April 2 (yes, the same day as the Switch 2 reveal) so at launch it will be literally free-to-play, even if microtransactions will slowly be added over time.
Weaver has a shield and a minigun you have to power up (Wargaming)‘Monetisation is definitely changing,’ says Tanasescu. ‘Players are definitely very smart, they always have been. But also, we’re not aiming for a teenage audience, but a bit older. They will always think where they are spending their money. If they enjoy something then definitely they will spend their money, but if they don’t like it they will not.’
Steel Hunters is different, even compared to other hero shooters, and the developers seem to have much more realistic expectations for it than many other companies. Their focus on a constant stream of new content and listening to the needs of players also seems very sensible, but as they themselves admit their game, like any other multiplayer title, is still a risk.
The initial reaction seems positive though and we certainly enjoyed our time with it, which hopefully means that there’ll be two super successful giant robot games by the end of the year. Then maybe that will encourage the mechanised video game renaissance we’ve always dreamed of.
Formats: PC (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5
Price: Free-to-play
Publisher: Wargaming
Developer: Wargaming
Release Date: 2nd April 2025 (consoles in 2026)
Age Rating: 12
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
