Hawken keeps surprising us. First, we were surprised that the really great-looking mech shooter is being made by an indie studio, then it surprised us to learn that it would be free-to-play. And here's another surprise: Dave Perry's cloud gaming system Gaikai has signed a deal to let players see Hawken running through the service in advance of the planned December 12 release date.

Gaikai allows nearly any game to be streamed directly from its servers to any browser, which means that the first impression of the graphics-intensive Hawken will be playable anywhere Gaikai will run (including on some tablets, and computers of all shapes and sizes). This deal makes a lot of sense from both sides: Hawken needs a large audience to get its free-to-play engine running, and Gaikai could use a big title to connect users to its servers. The Gaikai demo will be on playhawken.com and a few other sites, so eyes open until then.