Hood: Outlaws & Legends
PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
The Sheriff is Nottingham’s answer to Mr X, his deadly approach announced with a shake of the screen
Developer Sumo Digital Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
The guard turns without warning, suddenly breaking the patrol route that would have put his back to us. Robin can’t have been spotted, surely – we’ve got him safely ensconced within one of the fort’s many convenient bushes. And yet, some quirk of the AI seems to have given this guard second sight, able to spot what should be hidden. He turns again and goes the way he was originally headed. False alarm.
We’re on Robin’s side here, naturally, but playing Hood: Outlaws & Legends often leaves us feeling a kinship with this poor, doomed guard. Peering into the gloom, unable to shake the sense that there’s something hiding just out of sight: in our case, some stronger incarnation of the game which shows its face only occasionally, before ducking back into the brambles of the one we’re actually playing.
We catch our first glimpse of it in the tutorial, a deft introduction to the game’s finest concepts. It walks you through a scripted version of a heist, introducing its cast one by one. It begins, of course, with Robin, who has traded in his tights for the Middle Ages equivalent of a ghillie suit. He’s the sniper, vulnerable up close but able to put an arrow through a skull from halfway across the map, and armed with special abilities that amount to, essentially, a flashbang and rocket-propelled grenade.
The rest of his band of thieves have undergone similar makeovers. Maid Marian is now Marianne, a woad-painted eco-warrior with an hidden blade protruding from one wrist, Senua by way of Eivor. Friar Tuck becomes Tooke, a tattooed mystic swinging a weaponised thurible: tricky to use properly, but lethal when it connects. And Little John has dropped the ironic prefix, going by the rather less characterful ‘John’. He’s a mullet-wearing bruiser, his role as the squad’s tank immediately obvious from his outline – and the fact that he alone can hoist portcullises open, holding them on his shoulders while teammates scurry past.
The entire Robin Hood myth is given similar grimand-gritty treatment. The Sheriff is Nottinghamshire’s answer to Mr X, his deadly approach announced with a shake of the screen, the clink of armour and, more often than not, a few gruffly delivered swearwords. Stealing from the rich takes the form of a tripartite heist; giving to the poor is nodded at with a post-game scale that lets you divide the proceeds between ‘for the people’ and ‘for the player’. In practice, it’s all for the player – the latter bucket is used to upgrade your home base, a militant training camp located (presumably) in Sherwood Forest.
The desaturated dreariness can become wearisome, but we can’t deny it lends itself well to a stealth game adaptation, which is exactly where Hood is most at ease. Multiplayer stealth is all too rare (at least, of this variety – Among Us and its kin practise an entirely different discipline) and Hood’s take is bladesharp. Each match begins with your squad of four outside the walls of whichever fortress you’re infiltrating, the opposing team on the far side, your only threat a few clusters of AI guards. They patrol in pairs, the natural nemesis of any stealth character – which is where your teammates come in. Even with voice comms off, you’re able to communicate by tagging targets, synchronising attacks so you pull one guard into a bush just as your marksman takes out their companion with an arrow. Or perhaps you whistle to draw a guard’s attention, allowing allies to sneak up behind them. These are simple manoeuvres, but in the moment they feel electric.
As matches go on, though, the game strays from these strengths. The first step of each heist is to snatch a key from the Sheriff’s belt, turning the game’s biggest threat into a walking objective. It plays like a miniature Hitman level, as you figure out his route (which changes each time) and pick off the guards to get close. Or at least, this is how it’s meant to work. Rare is the plan that survives contact with the enemy; rarer still is one that can survive contact with them and your own allies. It often becomes a case of waiting for one of the eight players to get impatient, at which point the match’s first phase is over, and it crashes into its second existence as a messy brawler. Combat isn’t Hood’s strong suit, its Souls-ish mix of light and heavy attacks, with a stamina meter and a narrow parrying window, lacking the finesse necessary to excel in an online multiplayer context. All this could be excused as punishment for failing to stay quiet, except that two of the available characters – Tooke and John – are designed for it.
This is one of the ways that Hood incentivises players to drag the game away from what it does well. We can’t tell if this is an accident of design or a misreading of its own qualities, but all the rewards go to the team that does something first – and doing something quickly is rarely contingent with doing it carefully. And so it all descends into a pile-on, everyone dying and respawning and rushing back in, the threat of the Sheriff and his goons quickly forgotten.
Most baffling of all is the way each match concludes. You lift the key, find a vault door hidden somewhere in the level, grab the chest within and carry it to the extraction. All of this can be done subtly, but the final stage requires staffing a winch, cranking your loot onto the getaway vehicle. Whichever team cranks last wins. This essentially shrinks the map to a single unmoving spot, the resulting head-on scrap only exposing the game’s inferior action. We occasionally glimpse more appealing strategies involving capturing respawn points, but they consistently lose out to simply rushing the objective. And in the resulting din, the stronger version of Hood – the one we occasionally spy in matches that manage to stay in the shadows for longer – slips away unnoticed. Just another false alarm.