You’re knee deep in Louisiana swamp. To your left you can hear the raspy coughing of the infected denizens of the land you’re trespassing on and to your right you hear the far-off gunshots of other players hunting for the same prey you are. There’s an uneasy tension in the air and you can almost taste the humidity in the air as you cautiously take your first few steps in Hunt: Showdown.
Hunt: Showdown is the latest game from Crytek who are trading the high-flying thrills of the Crysis series for something that’s a little slower and more methodical. Hunt: Showdown is a game you would classify as a PvPvE game in that you and a teammate have to hunt a bounty in this map full of monsters while also fighting off other teams of players looking to do the same thing. If you ever played Fallout 3’s Point Lookout expansion and wondered to yourself “Hey, this place isn’t as disgusting as it could be” then buddy do I have the game for you. Crytek’s reputation of creating the most popular benchmark game is on full display here with this game world fully realized in disgusting detail. The monsters all look like they crawled out of the swamp you’re exploring, and the sound design is just phenomenal. Hearing crows off in the distance knowing that another team of players are just over the clearing puts you in a state of mind similar to something like PUBG.
Now the basic setup of the game is that you start the game by selecting a bounty to hunt, currently the imposing butcher and a horrifyingly large spider that makes the most awful skittering sounds. You and your buddy are then dropped in a fairly large map where you’ll use what’s basically your Batman vision to scout for clues that will help narrow the location of the monster. Each clue you find scratches off a part of the map before eventually telling you exactly where it is. In each round the clues you’re given are randomly placed in one of the various preset locations so you might get games where they’re all right on top of each other and you get to the bounty quick or more spread out. After you’ve located your bounty the hard part kicks in because these boss fights are fairly difficult and require some communication if you want to succeed; running in guns blazing just isn’t going to cut it here. Certain bosses are weak to specific elements so you wouldn’t want to try to poison the spider for example. The bosses being able to appear in any one of the dozen locations also helps keep things relatively fresh since you’re never sure where you’re going to have to fight them. If you manage to kill the target then you proceed to perform a “banishment” process where you send the monster to hell and here’s the kicker, when this occurs every player in the game is given your exact location. This is when the game gets hectic because while you’re waiting for the banishment process to conclude you need to bunker down in the building and fend off any players who are looking to claim your bounty. Once the banishment process is over two tokens (which are used to level up your hunter) are left and you basically need to grab yours and run to one of three carriages to escape the area.
This leads to interesting setups where you and your partner must decide how to tackle the round. Do you choose to go straight for clues to find the monster or instead follow players around? If you went for the clues do you go ahead and fight the monster or wait for another team to eventually find the spot and wait for them to weaken or kill the monster before swooping in? There’re a lot of ways to tackle different stages of the game as your playing a match which is honestly probably the most interesting thing about Hunt: Showdown.
In what was probably one of my best rounds, me and a partner decided to go about things slowly by following gunshots and hunting the hunters. We killed most monsters in our way and managed to take down two teams of players. We then decided to go for the main monster and since we hadn’t heard a gunshot in a few minutes we assumed all other teams had been wiped out. It wasn’t until we saw another player running around by himself that we realized our mistake and decided to take him out quickly. We traded some gunfire and as we slowly crept up to him we realized we had been duped hard. His teammate had been hiding in the distance and we were the ones being snuck up on and swiftly taken out. Our game ended in defeat but it was a tense, thrilling round where we had a lot of fun and learned new tricks. It’s moments like this that really make Hunt: Showdown stand out among its peers.
Now if you didn’t know, the game features some rogue-lite mechanics. In Hunt: Showdown if your hunter dies then he’s gone for good and the match is over. Doesn’t matter if you had a level 10 dude with some sweet guns and items you bought for him, it’s all gone if he bites it. You use the money you earn from matches to buy new hunters or equipment like health potions, guns or grenades for your hunter so kitting them out with powerful gear could increase your chances of survival, but it makes their inevitable death all the more bitter. For anyone concerned about what would happen if they run out of money don’t worry, because it’s really goddamn hard to do it. I had a few hundred dollars and decided to make it my mission to bankrupt myself and let me tell you it was some work. I basically had to buy the most expensive hunter and load him up with as many tools and consumables possible. I’d then hop into a solo game (because I’m not going to be a dick to the other players) and kill myself as fast as possible. This method took me maybe half a dozen tries so if it’s this cumbersome to put yourself in the red then I think most casual players shouldn’t need to ever worry. Now if you somehow manage to lower your funds so low you can’t afford a Tier 1 hunter then the game will shuffle you some very special Tier 0 hunters with the caveat being that you can’t edit their loadouts until they hit level 4; either that or you just play a game or two and get enough cash to purchase a new Tier 1 hunter.
Being in alpha, the game definitely has some issues to iron out before its official release. The UI in the main menu isn’t the most responsive with some inputs having a bit of a delay and other elements not being very clear. The load time to get into a game is also staggeringly long with it taking at least a minute to get into a match, sometimes going up to two. And let’s toss some optimization issues on top of that because as someone with a fairly beefy PC, even I had trouble getting the settings to deliver a stable FPS count. Currently the game recommends at least a GTX 970 but even with stronger cards the game gave mixed results on even the low settings with everything flipped off. Besides the technical stuff, I have concerns about how the game handles picking a bounty. When you want to start a match you have a multitude of options to select from: the spider bounty, the spider at night, the butcher bounty, the butcher at night, and a dual monster hunt. These many options are going to completely sever the community in the same way Call of Duty DLC does to its online community. They need to condense these options if they hope to not have their player base split across various match types; imagine wanting to play the butcher at night but nobody is picking it so you can’t ever get into a game with other players? Solo is an option, but Hunt: Showdown’s entire appeal is in doing these hunts with other players.
Hunt: Showdown is shaping up to be an interesting multiplayer shooter assuming it can tighten up its technical issues and add enough variety to the final product.
