You know how you get the flavour of the year, and how EVERYTHING has to be about that genre, and this year its Battle Royal game modes? Well Hunt: Showdown is NOT a Battle royal game, but most review sites for some reason are calling it the evolution of Battle Royal, which it completely isn’t.
This is more like…an MMO with bounties? Fuck I just compared it with another genre.
Hunt: Showdown is a game where you go into a map, choose a bounty and you have to “hunt” them down, and these are not EASY targets to kill, these are significant fights that take some time, and really make you feel powerless.
Now the first mission I did was I had to go and kill a spider, I found the guy in a barn
One of the problems at the moment is this game has a LOW population and that really shows when you are trying to find a match, there seems to be no point trying to go for a coop matchmaking, you are either buying this with friends or your clicking that solo button. Though even though your Solo you still need to be put into a match, which again takes a while and is pretty frustrating.
Though if you have your friend group that games together, this won’t be as much of a problem, but if they’re not on, you’re going to be riding solo or waiting for that matchmaking to finally find your players.
When in game, the whole point is you have your Hunters who have different weapons, money and starting gear, and you will slowly complete the hunts to level them up and buy better gear and Armor to help hunt bigger and more expensive bounties.
Though you need to be careful, because if you die that’s it, your done, everything is lost, so some people will not like the permadeath, so if you hate that? This is not the game for you.
But I love this danger, its why I loved Escape from Tarkov, you NEED to embrace the stealth, you NEED to embrace how slow the game is because if you rush in guns blazing, you will die and will get frustrated.
The game Is slow, you have to move slowly through the map otherwise you will attract the attention of the locals, or for a more accurate term, just zombies. They are not too tough and can be taken out with a quick backstab, but they are pretty easy to kill, but swarm pretty quickly around you and can drag you down.
You explore the map with “Hunter” vision that takes you towards clues, from the clues they will point you towards your target or targets depending on how many you took on at the start of the map. It’s a pretty simple premise but the difficulty OF the game is where the challenge comes from.
Graphics the game looks pretty stunning, potentially one of the best looking games I’ve seen in a while, everything fits the mood the game SEEMS to be going for, in that sort of south-west American style. Things are bust up, most shacks you come up across are in a state of disrepair and everything just feels off. Everything feels dirty, or at least like it hasn’t been looked after, and considering the game is in a very swampy area you would expect this, so the game sets the mood right from the get-go very well. Though you might find it difficult to actually SEE everything with how dark the bloody game is, I mean this game is DARK. Don’t get me wrong, this game IS a stealth game, and you expect it to be dark, but if you get a night level from the get-go you’re going to be reaching for those gamma levels just to give you a little bit more visibility.
This is a game that is “Hardcore” and I hate people who use that to describe games, but really this one is, this is not a game for everyone, it does not hold your hand. Please, GOD, I don’t want to see people call this the Dark Souls of FPS because it isn’t, it’s just a very hard and very strategic game that needs a lot of thinking before you actually complete a task. This is akin to the early Rainbow Six games where you had to really prep and know how you were going to take on a fight before doing it vs today’s more, I can get through most situations as long as I can shot and aim fast enough.
Though just expect this difficulty, and don’t be surprised when you trip up for that first death and try and not get too attached to them. Because you are going to lose a lot of characters before you find that character loadout that is slightly broken but will pull you through every fight pretty easily.
Going forward as a game? I hope they realise they can’t rely on the player base as it is right now, sure no game ever wants to admit that it’s not selling as well as it could and the population of it is low, but this is early access and they need to get that sorted to make it more playable for the rest. Apart from that, more customisation and bounties, but I think the game is going to be a winner…no chicken dinner though, please.
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