Former Hawken Folks Announce Multiplayer FPS Burstfire

A group of folks who worked on ill-fated mech FPS Hawken have formed a new studio and announced their first game, a multiplayer FPS which sounds a bit like Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege. They describe Burstfire [official site] - which won't be free-to-play - as a "slow paced" 5v5 tactical shooter where one team's fortifying and defending a position and the other must crack it (with the help of explosives, obvs).

Unfortunately Hawken's oh-so-pretty futuretrash look is left far behind, and Burstfire appears to be about surly men running around houses and places with wooden crates.

The idea is for tactical, cautious and deadly combat, with drones for scouting, and classless roles defined by whatever equipment you pick. Defenders want to secure a place and can erect barriers, while the attackers want in and can blow those barriers up - a bit R6 Siege-y. If this can be a more serious, cautious alternative to Siege's arcade-y action, that might be interesting.

The Burstfire team at Nacho Games is headed by Dave Nguyen, who co-founded Hawken developer Adhesive Games and was the shooter's design lead. Other former Adhesive folks are onboard too. Having worked on Hawken might be off-putting to some, though. Hawken became grossly neglected, with long-standing bugs going unfixed and silence from Adhesive and publishers Meteor Entertainment. It was never clear quite which part of the partnership was responsible for the mess, though it's known Meteor had financial troubles. The game is finally getting attention again after the folks who took over APB also picked up Hawken in March.

Burstfire is slated to arrive this summer, and it looks like it'll be an Early Access release. Alpha signups are open on its site, as are a few more "screenshots" which look staged.