There is something about large mech fights that gets the blood pumping. I’ve enjoyed them in pretty much any form they’ve been presented to me, whether it be running around Earthsiege and Mech Warrior 2 back in the 90s, watching Gundam Wing and SEED as a teenager, and everything in between.
So when World of Tanks developer Wargaming announced last year they were making a mech combat game, I was pretty much intrigued from the jump. Announced during last December’s The Game Awards, Steel Hunters is a PvPvE mech combat game with both hero shooter and extraction shooter elements. Players will don the role of one of the eponymous Hunters and battle it out over resources, specifically an extraterrestrial resource, Starfall.
During a closed doors meeting with Wargaming at last week’s GDC 2025, I had the chance to go hands on with Steel Hunters, playing through a few matches against AI opponents to get a feel for what to expect when it launches into early access on April 2nd.
Mech Battles Commence
After going through a short tutorial mission that taught the ins and outs of mech battle, I was thrown into my first match. Each Hunter is equipped with a weapon distinctive of their class type, such as Heartbreaker’s long-range rifle or the Fenris’ AOE rockets, as well as a set of skills that help to define their role within a squad. Each squad consists of two mechs, and there can be multiple squads in any given engagement, all vying for the same Starfall and extraction.
There are two ways to win a match – extracting successfully or destroying your rival squads. I do like that Steel Hunters does give you options here – I’m not the biggest fan of extraction shooters, but knowing I can still win another way here helps me be more interested, if I’m honest.
Dropping into my first match, I was greeted by a somewhat desolated landscape set in a fictional county of the old United States called Maryland Heights. Wargaming has always been good at creating interesting maps to fight within, and Maryland Heights (and the Welsh-inspired Stonecutter Keep) is no different.
The hilly landscape made it feel like an enemy team could simply appear around any corner. Early stages of the match consisted of me taking out NPC drones for resources, such as powerups to my attack damage to medkits to heal my Hunter in a pinch. This early resource rush is crucial, both to build up your Hunter’s level, but to also equip yourself for the more difficult battles to come.
Running around initially as the wolf-inspired Fenris Hunter, I will say I was slower to move than I anticipated I would be. Thankfully, Fenris has a Blink ability that sees the mech cross long distances in a…well…blink.
This came in handy during my first major firefight against a full AI team of Hunters. Using Blink to move out of the line of sight of an enemy Razorside Hunter, I tried to flank the first enemy while my own allied Razorside tried to cut him down with his assault rifle. Each enemy has a weakspot that is highlighted when you aim down your sights, and I was able to score some hits with my rockets before the enemy’s own Fenris started on me.
The Blink does come in handy, making escape easy, but the enemy was just as mobile and followed me, letting lost his plasma arc, a powerful sphere of plasma that explodes when it hits its target or when it hits its max range, dealing large amounts of damage in a large area.
It was at this moment that a third squad decided to join the fray, signaled by the sudden appearance of a missile strike from a nearby Prophet Hunter. The battle turned into an all out brawl, spilling into the remnants of the small factory town that once bustled with life in the valley we turned into our battle ground.
Nearly everything in Steel Hunters is destructible, and there’s such a power fantasy of running through whole factory buildings to slash a nearby mech with my Fenris’ giant paw. I blinked towards the Prophet that was hugging the ridgeline ahead of me, unaware that both of my AI teammates were already destroyed. Three Hunters converged on me, easily making mincemeat of my Fenris.
Needless to say, it was a ton of fun – and that was just against AI. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when I play against other players, but I daresay it’ll be just as, if not more so, hectic as that was.
The next match I tried out Heartbreaker, the stealthy sniper archetype. And it’s here where I really fell in love with Steel Hunters.
It took a bit to dial in how the sniper rifle works – it’s not simply a press of the mouse button and a round fires off; instead you’ve got to hold it down to dial in the shot. There’s a rhythm to it took me a fair few fights with NPC drones to get the hang of. But once I did it made each engagement much more satisfying.
Heartbreaker also has a cloak, which came in handy getting out of sticky situations. Leaving my allied Razorside to effectively tank damage, I would slip away with the cloak and line up a headshot, the damage helped along by damage boosts I’d picked up along the way.
Scoring hit after hit, I started to whittle down the enemy teams, all while we tried to make it to the extraction point and leave with the Starfall. Heartbreaker’s other skill allows her to ping with radar, picking up any nearby enemies – something I always forgot as we were running to another location but never seemed to forget when in the thick of battle.
I would use this ping to find where the remnants of a team were so we could finish them off, my rifle shots dealing death from afar. Despite the devastation we were causing, I was honestly surprised when the match ended after a well placed headshot from my rifle. We had defeated all the opposing teams, meaning we didn’t have to rush to extract – there was no one left to oppose us.
Heading into Early Access
Honestly, Steel Hunters impressed me, and it wasn’t just the game itself. Wargaming’s plans for Steel Hunters this year feel ambitious and, for maybe the first time in gaming history, ungreedy.
When Steel Hunters launches into Early Access next month, it will do so as a free to play game with no monetization. The goal is to build the PvPvE shooter with feedback with the players – during the recent closed beta last year Wargaming states they got over 700 pages of feedback from testers.
The lack of monetization means that players will have access to everything for free when Steel Hunters launches into Early Access. This doesn’t mean that there will never be monetization in Hunters, though. Season 0, which is what EA launches into, will not have it, but Wargaming will start to introduce it with Season 1’s launch later this Spring.
However, creative director Sergey Titarenko stressed when touching on the monetization model that everything you can buy you can earn in game, and that there isn’t any chance to buy power here.
The team is also aiming to have a rather short Early Access period. There is a clear desire from testers and mech fans to play this game, but Wargaming doesn’t seem to want to find themselves in the same development hell many Early Access games wallow in for years. Titarenko states that Steel Hunters is still planning a full 1.0 launch sometime later this year, with a potential console launch a year after the PC full release.
April 2nd is fast approaching, and I’m rather excited to see what the reception is once Steel Hunters is in the wild, though. There are a ton of extraction shooters, which Steel Hunters reminds me most of when I play it. Can the market support another one long term? Will the Wargaming faithful be enough to keep Steel Hunters chugging along, or are there enough mech heads like myself eager for new giant robots to throw at each other to help bolster the numbers? Time will tell.
I just know look out for my Heartbreaker come April 2nd.
