Hunt: Showdown wants you to feel panic. There’s the panic that ensues when the echoes of your gunshots ring out in the forest around you, potentially attracting monsters and players. Then there’s the panic of trying to franticly escape a level with a prize before other players track you down. And finally, the panic and frustration of losing one of your hunter characters who’d amassed a hefty stash of gear over multiple successful hunts, all because you were careless around a pack of zombie dogs. It’s an addictive type of panic that, when everything clicks, is wholly unique and exhilarating in a way that no other game can be.
Hunt is an Early Access first-person shooter from Crytek with a more nuanced premise than most: You (and your partner, if you bring one) are thrown into a swamp-spattered jungle with minimal supplies and the goal of hunting down and killing a twisted, demonic monster somewhere on a map full of smaller but similarly angry monsters. But it’s not that simple. Not only do you need to kill a monster, you then need to escape while evading other players. It has a very Lovecraftian-meets-Van Helsing setting, which does an excellent job of amping up the tension with some of the most realistic uses of actual darkness I’ve seen in recent memory. Instead of just being a vague, blurry, blueish filter over the screen, nighttime feels like an actual absence of light. With a quality pair of headphones, Hunt delivers the spine-tingling sounds some of the creatures make as they stalk you, and quickly becomes one of the most unnerving games out there.
A round of Hunt consists of searching for clues, locating and killing your target, then escaping with your prize – but it’s a lot easier said than done. In its Early Access stage, the only two targets are a giant spider and a lumbering butcher who likes to set things on fire. I’ll never forget the first time I faced the butcher: I was carelessly rounding a corner in the basement of an old farmhouse and got absolutely demolished by his giant, hammer-like weapon in just a couple of smashes. We had to kite the behemoth to take him down, running away and taking quick pot shots whenever possible.
The monsters offer up a decent challenge and are fun when when all of the elements work in tandem against you. But, as they stand, the boss monsters’ AI needs a lot of work. The butcher, for example, refuses to walk through doorways, so it’s extremely easy to exploit this by running outside and blasting him in the back as he walks away. Of course, this does then run the risk of exposing you to other players waiting for you to exit the building after this trick.
But before you can fight a monster, you’ve got to track them down using your Dark Vision ability, which blacks out the world around you to illuminate a trail that leads to the nearest clue. (Naturally, with so many threats lurking, it’s extremely risky to leave this on longer than you absolutely have to.) Disappointingly, all of the clues are just blackish-blue pits that you hover your hands over for a few seconds before getting the trail for the next clue – effectively a simple pickup. In a sense, the word “clue” is a bit of an overstatement, but each one you find does narrow down the potential location of the monster.
Once you locate the target, you have some important decisions to make. You can go in guns blazing if there aren’t too many enemies nearby or if you’ve got enough explosives and ammo to not care. Otherwise you’ll have to use stealth to stay hidden and carefully plan your approach to each encounter. This is where having a partner to help cover you really comes in handy.
When you’ve finally downed one of the named beasts in a partially glitchy battle, you have to banish it to Hell, a ritual which takes time and notifies everyone on the map exactly where you are. Initiating the ritual will shift other players’ tracking senses to focus on your trail instead of the monster’s, and marks your location with a map marker. It’s a clever mechanic that completely flips around the hunting dynamic. You can no longer hide and you no longer have a target to hunt as you enter full-on escape mode, which totally changes the way you play. Few games offer the same sense of exhilaration and panic as a match nears its finale in Hunt.
Whether you’re the hunter or the hunted, teamwork is crucial for covering each others’ backs. That makes playing solo incredibly difficult, to the point where Hunt is one of the few games that I actually preferred playing with a random (and often silent) partner to just going it alone. Loneliness makes Huntmore difficult, but it’s also boring since it can end up feeling like a shallow game of hide and sneak. With a partner, you’re at least emboldened to act more aggressively and decisively.
The competitive side comes from the fact that you’re constantly racing against up to 11 other hunters (with a max total of 12 in a game) to find and kill the target. But it’s more than a deathmatch -- the temptation to shoot first and ask questions later is certainly there, but it can be more beneficial to stalk other players and let them do the dirty work of thinning out enemies themselves (and take some hits in the process) before you swoop in to finish off whoever wins.
Take a look at 12 minutes of gameplay, above, with an explanation from the game's creative director on how matches ebb and flow.
By mixing cooperative and competitive elements together, Hunt creates a frantic “kill or be killed” atmosphere that leads to some truly palpable moments of tension. My first encounter with another player was about as tense as you’d expect. My partner and I were crouched down in waist-deep swamp waters, peering at our enemy as he slowly crept around the backside of a barn. We snuck up behind him and I blasted him in the back of the head with my shotgun, killing him instantly – but we’d neglected to check our surroundings first, or we’d have noticed that the farm was full of horrifying zombie-dog creatures. Though that fight didn’t end well, I didn’t regret a single second of the overall experience.
Matches typically only last for about 20 minutes, which is good because they can get boring if there is a shortage of action. You’ll spend the first five or so minutes sneaking around trying to make as little noise as possible, but that part of it just isn’t as engaging as it is in dedicated stealth games. There aren’t any specific mechanics or features that play to the stealth action -- it’s literally just large spaces with mostly oblivious AI wandering around. The introductory stealth environment felt like artificial padding to the lengthen matches where, in reality, getting straight to the action is where the game is most entertaining.
Eventually, every round in Hunt turns into a mad dash for the boss and the exit at the very end. Hunt is full of highs and lows without much in between. Part of that is due to the fact that even though it’s thematically consistent with the post-apocalyptic wasteland setting, the single map feels empty thanks to a lack of landmarks and interesting buildings. There’s barely any loot to find during matches other than ammo, which limits the desire to explore and scavenge, and the limited player count decreases the sense of mass desperation. In fact, you could play several games without ever seeing another player. Hunt does a lot of things that add much-needed terror to the genre, but it could stand to include more mechanics to funnel players together more regularly, too. Hunt’s setting may be a wasteland, but its environment and battle dynamics can frequently feel like one, too.
Some bigger problems still need solutions, too. Chief among them: there’s nothing stopping players from skipping the hunt phase entirely and camping the extraction points -- which are always in the same location-- and waiting for someone else to kill the monster and try to escape with it. Or, more ambitiously, they can simply follow other players, let them kill the monster, and then pick them off while they’re weak to steal the reward for themselves. Getting the flow of those battles right is going to be a tricky balance to strike, and Crytek hasn’t quite found it yet. It’s simply too easy to get away with this kind of profitable murder.
There are more delicate balancing issues at play. Unlike many other games of this nature, Hunt has real, tangible consequences for each death. The named hunter you were using, the guns you bought, the tools you equipped, all of his upgrades/perks, and all of his gear are lost when you die. (It’s sort of like if Escape From Tarkov and Evolve had a twisted, brutal little baby.) The only things that, mercifully, carry over are your experience points and profile level, which Hunt conveys with a bloodline system (suggesting that all of your hunters are from some sort of deranged monster-killing family). As your bloodline level increases, you unlock new tiers of gear -- like better guns, but those guns still cost money to acquire each time, and you also lose a bit of money when you die, so it all feeds back into itself.
Thankfully, your persistent account accrues in-game money over the course of playing games and completing contracts that you can use to spend on recruiting new hunters, buying new gear, and purchasing incremental upgrades. Having more than one hunter at a time can be advantageous because it allows you to keep more than one geared up so that you don’t lose all of your progress – kind of like multiple save slots. Hunters are also assigned randomized traits when you recruit them, which could make them bandage faster (with the Physician trait) or sprint at full speed for longer (with the Greyhound trait), adding some variety to each playthrough.
You’re never completely screwed: If you’re totally tapped out and can’t afford to recruit a new hunter, you can fall back on a zero-cost stand-in that you can use to try to gain back some funds. It’s a minor, but appreciated failsafe that ensures you won’t hit a brick wall of failure.
That said, the first few matches for a new player in Hunt are so difficult, they can feel like a barbed-wire fence of failure. But considering how hard it is to come by new upgrades, it would be nice to have some way to try before you buy. Blowing a bunch of money on a gun only to realize you don’t even like it, or buying a gun and getting killed before you even get a shot off is immensely frustrating.
Thankfully, your persistent account accrues in-game money over the course of playing games and completing contracts that you can use to spend on recruiting new hunters, buying new gear, and purchasing incremental upgrades. Having more than one hunter at a time can be advantageous because it allows you to keep more than one geared up so that you don’t lose all of your progress – kind of like multiple save slots. Hunters are also assigned randomized traits when you recruit them, which could make them bandage faster (with the Physician trait) or sprint at full speed for longer (with the Greyhound trait), adding some variety to each playthrough.
You’re never completely screwed: If you’re totally tapped out and can’t afford to recruit a new hunter, you can fall back on a zero-cost stand-in that you can use to try to gain back some funds. It’s a minor, but appreciated failsafe that ensures you won’t hit a brick wall of failure.
That said, the first few matches for a new player in Hunt are so difficult, they can feel like a barbed-wire fence of failure. But considering how hard it is to come by new upgrades, it would be nice to have some way to try before you buy. Blowing a bunch of money on a gun only to realize you don’t even like it, or buying a gun and getting killed before you even get a shot off is immensely frustrating.
