MekTek showed off a very early, alpha build of its upcoming mech game, Heavy Gear Assault. The Heavy Gear franchise is actually quite old, first appearing on the PC in 1997 so there’s a lot of lore and back story to work with.
Gameplay is fast paced arena battles, which differentiates it from other mech games like Hawken. The game will be free-to-play with tons of parts and accessories for sale so there will be a lot of customizations for mechs. The area setting makes battles intense and quick. Mechs will show battle damage that reveals the skeletal frame below their metal skins.
We spoke with the president of MekTek, Vincent McMullin, about his ideas for the game. He wants there to be over 300 Heavy Gears and Striders. He also told us that MekTek is in talks with hardware manufacturers about creating a controller specific for mech games.
Heavy Gear Assault is very much in the early stages of development from the short hands on we got with the game. The controls need to be tweaked to be more intuitive and responsive. The game is using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, which looks very impressive in the tech demos. The early build we saw doesn’t look anything as impressive as the Unreal Engine 4 demos but that’s understandable since it’s still in its infancy.
The company plans to bring Heavy Gear Assault to Windows, Mac, and Linux through the Steam distribution platform. MekTek will be taking the game to Kickstarter in April with a planned open beta for Q1 of 2014. MekTek is planning on raising $800,000.
