Steel Hunters preview – a great hero extraction shooter cut too short

Wargaming’s Steel Hunters is a massive bet for the studio. Launching in an unstable period for new live-service games, the World of Tanks developer’s massive new mech game is a clever blend of hero shooters like Marvel Rivals and extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov.

After waking up at 3:00AM to go to Wargaming’s office in Guildford, I managed to play around two hours of what was initially conceived as World of Mechs. After years of universe building and iterative development, the UK-based team has created an incredibly satisfying free-to-play game, but one that feels like it ends too soon.

Steel Hunters is actually kinda brilliant

Set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a Starfall disaster, you play as one of the titular Steel Hunters, a fusion of man and machine where humans give up their mortal bodies to become big metal beasts. Some mechs are more humanoid, whereas others are more animalistic. For example, Weaver, a spider-robot, has all the legs you’d expect as well as the agility.

Each fifteen-minute-or-so match in Steel Hunters works around the same type of formula we see in battle royale games. You hunt across the map with your partner to find upgrades and hunt down resources. You’ll fight AI-controlled drones at key points to nab resources and battle players as they come your way—at the end you go to extraction.

The core of Steel Hunters is extraordinarily fun with every mech having its own weight, speed and hero shooter abilities. The movement is solid, especially when combined with the game’s building-levelling destruction tech is as satisfying as you’d expect. Weaver, again, is particularly satisying in this regard with a sideways spider-roll that can slide right through a small wall.

When another group joins the fray, Steel Hunters become surprisingly intense with each character’s hero shooter abilities playing their own tactical hand. Fights can be over in seconds, or minutes, with longer fights having more of a chance for a third group to enter the battle. However, there are also long stretches of no player interaction as the game’s expansive maps can leave you on your lonesome for quite some time.

At the end of every match of Steel Hunters, I found myself feeling unsatisfied, not because the game itself is bad, but because it often feels like it;s ending just as it’s getting good. Whether you’re playing as the extremely agile Fenris, essentially a robot wolf, or the sniper Heartbreaker, there’s so much versatility to combat that I want to explore in every match, but they typically ended just before I could.

However, Steel Hunters is launching with a year of early access with everything unlockable in-game and zero account resets upon the full game. It’s clear that there is an extremely solid base here to work on, and I’m excited to see it grow. At the moment, the game doesn’t quite stick the landing, not because its gameplay is bad, but because it’s pacing is ever-so-slightly off.

With longer matches and maybe an increased player count, I can see this mech game becoming another Wargaming great with long legs. Whatever the case, the game is launching as a free-to-play title, so I would urge everyone to give it a shot anyway.

Steel Hunters launches in Early Access on PC on April 2^nd, 2025. A console version is in the works for a later launch.