Hawked Hands-On Preview: It's a Less Serious Extraction Shooter

ign.com:

The extraction shooter is blowing up, and upcoming release Hawked might be the most approachable shot at the PvPvE genre yet. Where other games focus on an aggressively tight and hardcore experience, Hawked is importing some game design from the more approachable battle royales in order to get you into rounds of treasure-hunting mayhem with much less commitment.

The setup is simple. You and a team of friends pop up on an island overrun with lizard monsters to recover valuable seemingly-magical artifacts from the ancient ruins there before the lizards—or the other treasure hunters—can do the same. Taking out camps of lizards lets you loot new weapons and gear for this trip out, while going around solving puzzles gets you the key pieces of info you need to open up the treasure vault at the core of each round. Get the artifact inside, get out, and you win that round—unlocking or upgrading that artifact as a piece of gear for future runs.

Of course, that's not the only treasure around. The dang lizards have also already bogarted a piece, and hunting down their treasure-carrying dinosaur will let you nab a second artifact in each round. The problem with that route is that everyone else knows exactly where the dino loot is, so trying to nab that artifact is much more likely to put you in conflict with enemy teams—and there are ten teams of three out there gunning for the same two pieces of loot.

For all that, though, the map didn't feel crowded during the preview. Most of a match was exploring, taking down lizards to gear up, and finding clues to the vault. Lizards are all over the place too, meaning that if your team is willing to pick a few fights they can get their preferred gear pretty quickly. At the same time, some of those