Steel Hunters is like a more tactical Titanfall, but as an extraction shooter it's undermined by boring loot

Less than a minute remains on Steel Hunters' countdown clock when the last surviving pair of Hunters lumber into view, rolling over a hilltop toward the same extraction point my own team waits at. Even across a half-mile of desolate wasteland pocked by buildings, I can tell they are Weaver, a mechanical spider armed with a chaingun, and Razorside, who wouldn't be out of place in Call of Duty: Warzone, were it not for the fact he is eight metres tall.

My own Hunter, a floating purple humanoid mech named Prophet, is armed with a sort-of railgun that does massive damage when its shot is fully charged. Indeed, a few well-aimed shots makes short work of Razorside and rips through the deployable energy shield Weaver can generate. But the canny arachnid dips behind a building for cover, where it can repair and, provided it can hold out long enough, wait for its teammate to respawn.

Nerves of steel

It's a smart move. Or it would be, were it not for the fact that I just unlocked an ability called Strike Vengeance. On triggering this, my Hunter launches itself into the air, darkening the sky as it unleashes a barrage of missiles at a target painted by me. The missiles obliterate the building Weaver huddles behind, and does heavy damage to the spider as it scuttles away in retreat. More than enough for my own teammate, another Razorside, to finish it off with ease.

This encounter, the last of my hands-on session with Steel Hunters, epitomises the kind of battles that Wargaming's UK studio DPS Games hopes to generate in its free-to-play extraction shooter. Blending hero-style abilities with destructible, open-ended maps, the tactical potential of its third-person combat grew more evident with each game I played. But I'm less convinced by Steel Hunters' characterisation of an extraction shooter, mainly because it never felt like there was anything particularly worth extracting.

Let's rewind a bit. Steel Hunters is the latest recruit into Wargaming's growing army of free-to-play multiplayer titles, which started with World of Tanks and expanded with the underwhelming World of Warplanes and the deceptively popular World of Warships. According to creative director Sergey Titarenko, Steel Hunters was initially envisioned as a fourth companion to these games, essentially World of Mechs.

"Originally we had on paper in an early research and development phase, mechs, bipedal, chicken-like creatures with weapons [and] pilots" Titarenko says. However, initial testing of this idea quickly presented a problem. "It was difficult for us and for the players to really ID and memorise what it can do against me, who is this exactly?"

Instead, DPS took a cue from hero shooters, reenvisioning these mechs as more distinctive, individualistic war machines that do not have a pilot, but are instead infused with the soul of a human, enabling them to have a personality. "It's more mass market, but it's more definitive in terms of visual identification and attribution. If you see a bear [mech], you have an expectation it will act like a bear [mech]," Titarenko says. This approach comes with other bonuses too, like making it easier to tell stories about these characters across the game's live-service duration.

At the same time, DPS also wanted to explore a broader game mode than the rapid-fire multiplayer matches seen in Wargaming's other free-to-play titles, settling on an extraction shooter model. The result, Steel Hunters plays a bit like the mech phase of Titanfall's multiplayer, only third-person and with a less frantic pace.

Matches are structured around five teams of two, broadly following a familiar extraction format. Dropping into random points on sprawling, post-apocalyptic maps, teams are free to explore and chase down loot-caches and in-match objectives, dealing with any other players they encounter while doing so. A round ends when a team successfully completes an extraction, or when only one team is left standing.

I played my first two rounds as Razorside and Weaver respectively, and was a little underwhelmed by both. Razorside is very much the character for CoD kids, equipped with a gigantic assault rifle and able to throw grenades. He's fine, but a bit vanilla, and his weapon lacks a bit of oomph. Weaver, the scuttling spiderbot with a big ol' chaingun, is conceptually more intriguing, but that chaingun is tinny and hollow, and you can only fully spin it up as a special ability, which makes you feel like you're playing most of the match in second gear.

Admittedly, it didn't help that I spent most of these early rounds fighting against hovering AI cannon-fodder bots, which are neither satisfying to shoot, nor tactically interesting to fight. The experience demonstrably improved when I dropped in as Ursus, the bear Hunter Titarenko mentions, and started chasing down other players more actively.

Grin and bear it

Ursus can launch clusters of missiles from its back, which lock onto a target to pummel them into submission. This takes time to perform, leaving Ursus vulnerable to attack in the duration. Consequently, I had to be careful about when and where I deployed this ability, either using cover to keep myself protected, or relying on my teammate to distract enemies or help me stand my ground.

Playing as Ursus, I got a better glimpse of the more tactical experience Steel Hunters is aiming for. Designed to place less emphasis on players' twitch skills, Hunters move slowly and are fairly easy to target, so damage is instead mitigated by using cover and deploying protective abilities like Weaver's shield. "Like many 'World of' and War Gaming games, one of the pillars of our game is accessibility," Titarenko says. "It's easy to start to play your game, but there's depth and there's mastery. So you play and you understand more about characters abilities and tactical interactions."

At the heart of this is what DPS refers to as 'duo symbiosis', which is basically a fancy term for teamwork. Hunters are designed to work together in duos, with abilities that players can use to their respective advantage. To be clear, these aren't specific combos—they're designed to mix and match—but there are nonetheless some pairings that more obviously go together than others.

"Depending on who you play with, you will have a different experience, and you will be able to choose different strategies to do what you want to do," says Andrew Walker, senior producer on Steel Hunters. He cites Weaver and the support Hunter Trenchwalker as an example. "So Weaver's able to put a shield in front and he has a massive gatling gun, and Trench has the ability to do some healing as well as some longer range AoE damage With that, you can lock down choke points very easily."

The more I played Steel Hunters, the more its combat grew on me. Alongside the teamwork element, the destructibility of maps also plays a key role in your tactical approach. Using buildings to break line of sight with enemies is a good way to give yourself a chance to repair your Hunter or hold the line until your teammate respawns. But Hunters can flatten many buildings with explosive abilities or just by barging straight through them. This gives aggressive players the opportunity to press attacks, as well as letting you do things like ambush unsuspecting teams by bursting through a wall like the Kool-Aid guy.

There is one problem with Steel Hunters' destruction, however. Although it looks great, with buildings crumbling in spectacular, highly detailed fashion, it lacks physicality. Everything feels like it's made of polystyrene. Objects like trucks and shipping containers fly away from your Hunters' footsteps with no sense of their own weight, while ploughing through buildings feels like walking through a bead curtain, your giant mech parting the structure with minimal sense of impact or resistance.

My broader concern with Steel Hunters, though, is that while combat is fun, the whole extraction aspect is not hugely engaging. Loot is a key issue here. Outside of in-match consumables you pick up, like repair kits and temporary power ups, what you mainly collect during a fight are cores that provide buffs to things like damage, armour etc, and in-game currency used to upgrade your Hunter outside of play. None of this is particularly exciting, and since the tension of extraction shooters often rides on whether or not you'll get away with the goods, that tension is diminished here.

To some extent, this is intentional. Steel Hunters is pitched as a lighter take on extraction than Hunt: Showdown or Escape from Tarkov or even something like Delta Force. Rounds last maybe ten minutes apiece, and Titarenko explains Steel Hunters' loot game is more about accruing power during a match. "You max up towards the end of the match, and at end of the match you meet the squads and people that are up to your level most likely, and then you have a very intense end game final experience." This arc certainly works, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole loot element of Steel Hunters is a bit dull and low stakes.

In any case, Steel Hunters remains very much a work in progress. Not only is it launching into early access, the initial launch will have no monetisation attached to it. I wondered whether this is because Wargaming is aware Steel Hunters isn't quite ready for premium action, but Titarenko says it's more about figuring out what players want from the game. "We want to stay open minded, because the audience will tell us what they like. For example, we did some research about what they like, and for us, it was a discovery that a higher proportion of our population really liked skins, and investing in skins," he explains. "If there's player demand, of course we'll do our best to provide the supply for this."

While I think Steel Hunters' approach to extraction gaming will need some adjustment to give it longer-term appeal, for the moment, its diverse array of hunters and the potential combinations give it enough tactical potential to leave me intrigued. And any game that lets you level a small village as a hovering, missile-spewing eight-metre-tall robot is worth at least a cursory investigation. Steel Hunters releases into early access on April 2.