Hawken

It's pretty cool. I played for a while, but it didn't feel enough like a regular Mech game for my tastes because it was fast-ish like an FPS. Fun game, though.
I played on console (ps4) and it was free besides the in-game transaction stuff.

I thought it was fun, but felt like a scifi FPS rather than a mech shooter to me. Nothing wrong with being a scifi shooter but I wanted a mech game.

FPS game is distinguished from vehicular warfare games by a few aspects.

1. Side stepping or side strafing. Hawken has this. Walking War Robots doesn't, or for that matter, neither does MWO. Dashing in the new War Robots mechs isn't considered side stepping or strafing.

2. Interior maps. That's like fighting inside buildings, inside multistory buildings, with stairs that you go up and down, jumping up and down in the multistory platforms of a building. Vehicular warfare on the other hand, is based on open maps, landscape maps, urban maps, outside maps, though you can put a few short tunnels.

Hello, good sir!

Strafing in videogames is closing in on an enemy in a S-curve (left\right) while keeping aim\fire\shield towards enemy.
And what you have described is "circling" at best.

So, even battle in the beginning of the clip is not "strafing"  because robot is changing direction of his feet.

Think "strafe" as a "sidestep".

Oh, and as a sidenote - great job at coming laterally, this indicates a good pilot! You also might want to use "Rush" to move from cover to cover while firing.

I mean all I said above, absolutely no pun intended.

I'll be honest, guys, IMHO - strafing exists in War Robots, just like it does in COD and other FPS. Definition from wikipedia: "In video games, strafing is the technique of moving the player's character from side to side, rather than forward or backward." So when I go joystick right and keep my bot facing forward, I'm strafing. In PC FPS's this is what A and D do. Strafe left and right. So yes, it's sidestep, just like the dashbot is doing - with War Robots being a 3rd person view, you may be getting thrown off by the animation. For reference, I've thrown in here a 3rd person view from Quake and COD... you can clearly see the characters strafing, but the animation shows their legs moving "forward" while the torso is twisted to face the right direction.
Quake 3:
Black Ops 2:

That's pretty cool!! It reminds me of the dodging movement in Unreal. When it introduced dodging, though, it didn't mean that other games no longer had strafing, just that it had something extra.

And I found this map for the Hawken keyboard controls. It shows a modifier button for dodging, while A and D are for strafing.

PS: If my laptop could support playing Hawken, I'd be playing it.  It looks great! I'll take another look when I next get upgraded.  

In my opinion, no:

-The playerbase is like it was nuked

-Nearly impossible to hit light bots dominate the meta

-Those nearly impossible to hit light bots are only achievable after around 50+ hours of gameplay

If you want a good pc mech game, get MWO or MW4. There's also M.A.V coming out and the Starsiege games are free now. Don't forget to try out the Front Mission series as well. And you could also try out the Eurogrind tank simulators(i.e. WoT, War Thunder, and some other game made by Mail.ru, the same guys who bought out Pixonic). I'll comment back here once I think of more mech games.

MWO has major issues, one of them favors a light mech meta, and the other favoring a Clan mech meta, making Clan lights a big problem.  Not to mention a shrinking player population.  Compared to War Robots, the War Robots player base is huge and appears to be many times over.   And honestly, since I am coming from Mechwarrior Online, I am not very happy what's going on with it.  It also suffers from the legacy baggage of the Battletech lore, that does not fit properly to a modern 21st century video game.

M.A.V. is knockoff of Chromehounds. It seems basically made and played by people who could not accept the demise of Chromehounds.

The other tank game, published by Mail.ru but is actually coded by Obsidian (no more, it was given to Russian developers now), is Armored Warfare.  This had major balance issues, in my experience, seems to give small tank destroyers with rapid firing guns a big pass.  But recently Armored Warfare is going through a major balance overhaul but it remains to be seen if players (like me) would come back to it.