PREVIEW: Steel Hunters is World of Tanks with Mechs

There’s a good reason Wargaming didn’t choose to call its upcoming mech-based extraction shooter World of Mechs.

The developer, best known for globally dominant vehicular combat games World of Tanks and World of Warships, is bucking the naming convention to capture a newer, younger crowd. And with ten-metre-tall robots capable of leveling an entire office block with a single pneumatically-charged step, it’s probably going to get it.

Releasing in early access on PC April 2nd, and console in 2026, Steel Hunters is a free-to-play, 12-player multiplayer game in which six teams of two battle it out in powerful killing machines. “One of the things that we realized from early market tests is there’s not a lot of games like that,” says Andrew Walker, senior producer on Steel Hunters.

What is Steel Hunters?

“We want players to be able to make meaningful choices and who they partner with and what they choose, and we want to make sure that the decisions they’re making are reflected in their outcome of the game, And I think with 2v2, that’s much easier than 10v10 or 20v20.” Don’t call them mechs, however. They’re Hunters – giant robots mind-melded with human pilots so their brains are one.

What is the Story in Steel Hunters?

After a cataclysmic event contaminates the Earth with an alien resource called Starfall, corporations build Hunters to extract it. As mankind uses Starfall to fuel their ascent into space, an abandoned Earth has become a battleground.

The game launches with seven Hunters unique in body and ability. There’s a panther-like mech who can conjure a crackling ball of purple plasma to fry enemies, a stout spider-bot who drops holographic shields, and a cloaked, sentry-summoning humanoid who resembles a mechanised grim reaper.

Their powers are best used in conjunction. Walker names his favourite duo. “Weaver and Trenchwalker pair really well together,” he says. “Weaver’s got a gatling gun and shield, Trenchwalker has healing abilities and slightly longer range as well. So, putting those two together at the higher levels of gameplay is something that performs really well.”

Steel Hunters Modes

That’s the only way you’re going to come out victorious in the main game mode, The Last Stand. Here you’ll either have to beat the other two-person teams and be the last duo surviving, or control the randomly spawning extraction zone so you can airlift to safety. You only have one life, so when both of you die, it’s game over.

Steel Hunters is a lot more forgiving than it sounds. Healthbars are huge, so you can take lashings of punishment, and every Hunter can dodge and sprint to escape a sticky situation. You won’t get headshotted from across the map and slink back to the menu, dejected.

The pace is purposeful, and not just because of its long time-to-kill. Reloading takes around ten seconds, as does repairing damage, so choosing when to do either is a big commitment. It’s as if there’s an operational cost to running your robot, which makes them feel like the land-destroying, fuel-guzzling beasts they are.

Along the way you can take down AI-controlled drones for health kits and damage upgrades. They’re not as exciting to fight as other Hunters, however, so going after them feels more like a chore on your checklist.

Despite a plurality of objectives, matches boil down to the same mission: survival. That’s because the final task is for all remaining players to control a single drop zone, resulting in one last all-out skirmish. It’s fun and frantic, but starts to get samey when all matches end a similar way.

Steel Hunters Maps

The three maps I try offer destruction on a grand scale. Each taking around a year to design and build, they’re several kilometres wide to host the sudden influx of a dozen towering robots. They’re not without impact, either. From the initial sub-orbital drop-in that leaves deep craters in the ground, your Hunter deals serious collateral damage.

You can sprint through a row of houses, kick full-sized fire trucks out of the way like plastic toys, and completely level entire city blocks in a shower of dust and debris. Everything that looks destructible is destructible. It gives the game a sense of weight and heft.

“We put a lot of effort into a sense of scale when we’re creating things for map in the environment,” Walker explains. “We’re trying to make sure that we have a banana for scale. Like we have cars and we have items that are around the maps to make sure that the Hunters feel the correct size, because obviously, if it was just a bunch of Hunters running around, there’s no comparison objects.”

An abnormally high level of detail on the Hunters themselves communicate how big they are. Zooming in and seeing what you thought was an ammo belt actually strung with torpedo-sized shells brings weight and heft that would otherwise be lost.

Steel Hunters Heroes

Each Hunter is made of hundreds of parts put together to bring grounded realism to the game. You can imagine these mechs physically existing, each bolt and rivet in its rightful place. It also makes the animator’s job easier; they don’t have to worry about giving players a glimpse at a half-baked texture when the models look good at every angle.

Wargaming devs joke it’s a necessity – sooner or later an animator is going to add an unconventional emote or idle animation that really shows them off.

In fact, that’s the plan. Steel Hunters is changing all the time, constantly being refined and re-evaluated in the run-up to its early access launch. While some elements are getting balanced, others were jettisoned early – like the grappling hook.

“It’s very, very challenging to make it feel good for either the person being grabbed or the person grabbing,” says Walker, “because of a latency between things. There’s always a slight uncanny value, no matter how good you get it, it’s always slightly off. So we park that for now and put that to one side. We’re not gonna look at that for a while I don’t think, but if we do come back to it, it will require a lot of work.”

Steel Hunters is probably best described as Apex Legends meets Titanfall 2. Abilities feel impactful, heroes distinct, and the PvPvE action strategic, prizing tactics over reflexes. Ludicrously destructive and laced with a serious sense of scale, Steel Hunters is primed for battle.