Hunt: Showdown
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Real innovation in today’s FPS genre is heard, and not seen. Where once 3D lighting and open-world tech marked the path of progress, the most accomplished shooters are now identified by plugging in your headphones and listening to the player-made percussion on offer. In Hunt: Showdown, that means settling down with the free jazz of the forest: the telltale squeak of a lantern’s hinge, backed by the crunch of a branch beneath a heavy boot. A dissonant choir of crows disturbed by footfall, inspiring an impassioned screaming solo from a nearby Hive. And finally, crescendo: the hiss of dynamite or crack of a rifle. Or perhaps nothing at all. Conflict is never a foregone conclusion in Hunt, and not necessarily advised.
Long ago, Crytek’s simulationist approach to shooters made it famous. The studio flew gliders across a skybox that had previously been just for show, and filled the seas that bordered its maps with sharks. Now, after a decade of disappointment, it’s applied its design philosophy to battle royale. The result takes away as much as it adds. The standard 100 players are reduced to a maximum of 12, leading to long stretches without human contact. The encroaching wall that shrinks the map has been swapped out for the slowly revealed location of a bounty – stick replaced with carrot. And finally, the onscreen player count is missing, leaving you with no idea how many are dead or lying in wait.
The latter decision is most instructive: Hunt is a game that starves you of information. You’re not picking up new weapons or armour as you creep across its 19th-century Louisiana swampland, but knowledge. You locate the monster lair that houses the bounty by investigating a series of ‘clues’ in or around flimsy farm outbuildings and abandoned logging stations. These glowing interaction points each reduce the search area by a fraction, until everybody knows where the titular showdown is scheduled to take place.
Even that cross on your map arms you with an unnervingly thin sliver of the facts, however. There’s no way of knowing how your fellow hunters – grouped in twos or threes or chancing it alone – have fared in their own investigations. A quiet lair might indicate that you got there sufficiently quickly to bag the bounty and away to an exit without any PvP combat at all. Or, just as likely, that a swifter team has set up a perimeter, ready to mug you for your hard-won monster remains. Perhaps there’s another pair watching them, too, from the tower that overlooks the road to the nearest extraction point. Developers like to describe games as possibility spaces; every match of Hunt posits a frankly uncomfortable number of ugly happenstances.
Those moments are when, with sight dulled by gloom and foliage, hearing plays an enhanced role. Hunt’s two large maps are living organisms, sensitive to any sensation on their surface. Non-player mobs function as jangling nerve endings – the thrashing river worms that lurk in the misnomered Stillwater, or the explosive immolators that walk like men but crackle like trees in the wake of a wildfire, still burning on the inside. They represent a direct threat to the clumsy hunter who stumbles across them, but more than that they pinpoint player positions, an auditory minimap for the close listener. It’s feasible, ideal even, to move about the map knees-bent, taking out threats with knives and silenced weapons. But every second spent crouched is one another player will use to sprint towards the objective. Hunt provides you with plenty of stealth mechanics but leagues of ground to cover, and that tension is deadly.
The bounty bosses flip the script – with the exception of the Butcher, a brutish tank, they cannot be surprised by stealth. Enter the lair of the giant spider and you instantly become its plaything, hoping only that when it does emerge at some alarming angle, you’ll get a shot in before it bites. The most tempting tactic is to dart in and out of the lair’s doors and windows, taking time to attend to wounds that can rapidly deteriorate thanks to the cumulative effects of burning and bleeding. But to do so risks exposing yourself to the crosshairs of rivals drawn by the bangs in the barn.
It may be that you’re accustomed to reading reviews of competitive shooters from an academic standpoint, appreciating their evolving design from a distance, knowing your ageing fingers can no longer twitch like those of the teenagers. In which case it’s our joy to inform you that Hunt rewards soft skills like no other contemporary shooter. Patience is rarely considered a virtue in the genre, but here it can grant you steady success, not least because a wrong move can kill your character, who will slip into the void along with the equipment and traits you might have gathered across multiple matches. Often the decision not to take a shot can save you from a costly firefight. Sometimes the opportunity for a safe bounty retrieval never emerges, and it’s better to leave the map with at least a couple of your health bars intact instead. Victory is slow-burn; if not in this match, then the next.
Inverse playstyles are possible: some teams of three crash through the map, turning the handles of found phonographs and twisting the valves of clanging generators to cause as much commotion as possible. They roll jars of bees into player hidey-holes and taunt their prey over localised voice chat. Yet even this racket is just another form of self-protection, a field of fear to keep other players at bay. Every hunter knows the unknown will kill them, and the abundance of unknowns is what grants Hunt: Showdown its tension, which creates matches that ring in the ears long after the fighting’s over – and will no doubt echo throughout the ever-growing canon of battle royale.
Provides you with plenty of stealth mechanics but leagues of ground to cover, and that tension is deadly