Man, I remember playing this game back in the days of the Free To Play Golden Age. We had Path of Exile, HAWKEN, and Blacklight Retribution and man...we just didn't know how good we had it.

Then, the cheaters came from far and wide like a virus that just completely wiped out HAWKEN and BLR. I had only gotten a short 60 hours in HAWKEN before I realized I would never get back into my Recruit CRT Hawk ever again.

Then, the new Awakening came and now, the memories of the FTPGA are flooding back. This game doesn't have EOMM/MMR, it doesn't have microtransactions (although the OG/Base game did), it doesn't have aim assist, it doesn't have a celebrity endorsement or skin, and it doesn't have serious AAA sponsorship or $1M in marketing and backing. It just has an extremely dedicated and talented team that has now reversed engineered the original game and made it self-sustaining once again. This is also fostering an amazing gamer community for the rebuilt HAWKEN as well.

Sure you can get your nostalgic feedback of HAWKEN with games like The Forever Winter, which consists of many of the HAWKEN dev team now and you should definitely give that game a look/purchase to support them, but nothing quite hits like HAWKEN does. Now, it's back and hitting harder than ever before! Every game mode, every customization, every bot, and more are back in action and it couldn't be better. This isn't HAWKEN: Reborn, I'm talking about HAWaKENing. If you're craving to play HAWKEN as it was designed and meant to be played, go get the HAWKEN: Awakening (not an official name) because it's nothing short of amazing.

I was apprehensive as well for obvious reasons (3rd party site/dev team, non official support, etc), but as far as I can tell, everything seems to be very legitimate. I even ran a scan on the .exe file and it was deemed safe from the scan. I've seen a couple of these "revitalizing projects," before and one even made its way back onto Steam so honestly we never know what the future may hold for our favorite games!

To play HAWKEN: Awakening (again, not an official name), just check the links below. Go to the site, create a profile, sign-in, download, and install. You won't be disappointed and this project definitely needs more players! The game is right at 3.6GB installed and will initially start up with terrible audio and graphics settings. So be prepared for a loud intro (which can actually be turned off in the custom launcher) that's set at a way low resolution, but HD/2K resolutions are supported (probably not 4K/widescreen though).

I've also included the Discord because it's pretty amazing and can help fill a DM/TDM/CTF/CO-OP server pretty quickly with a simple LFG shoutout.

HAWaKENing[hawakening.com]
HAWaKENing Discord[discord.gg]