HUNT: SHOWDOWN
The voice booms through the floorboards beneath my feet. “I gotta fix my car. My car broke down.” It’s an American accent, but it doesn’t belong to Louisiana, and certainly not to the 1890s, where you find yourself in Hunt: Showdown. That means there are two players, at least, feet away – and they can hear me just as easily.
The groan of a bracket or creak of a lantern can mean death in the attic, an end so pathetic Agatha Christie never bothered to write a novel on the subject. It’s hard not to think about – I can still see the body of Barbara Bunzler through a nearby window, lying prone in the courtyard. We were colleagues, fellow hunters, and during our time together she didn’t speak a word to me. The first sound I heard coming out of her head was the crack of a bullet from a Winchester rifle.
Eventually, the killers slink off – assuming, perhaps, that Barbara was operating alone. A few minutes later I leave the house in the opposite direction, sticking to the swamps until I spot the orange glow of a horse-drawn carriage. Other hunters will take the bounty today, but in Hunt, survival is its own victory.
DEAD FOREVER
Out in the bayou, permadeath doesn’t just mean no respawns, it means the loss of the weapons and traits tied to your character. It means you have to start again with a new recruit in a different hat. So you either tread softly, taking opportunities where they emerge, or storm into the fray knowing a mistake could cost you everything.
It’s one of several quirks that make Hunt a strange relative of the competitive shooters it shares a console with. There are echoes of battle royale, sure, in the way you narrow down the field of play – searching settlements for clues until you pinpoint the location of a boss monster, the lair where players will clash over the spoils. But spiritually, it’s closer to Modern Warfare’s Gunfight than Black Ops 4’s Blackout, an intimate game of close listening and intelligence gathering.
There isn’t a huge amount of intelligent life kicking about this highly fictionalised, demon-infested take on the historical Deep South. Crytek’s two enormous maps are populated by former locals – like the Hive, a rotting woman whose top half has popped open like a gone-off packet of Pringles, spraying bees everywhere. Or the Meathead, blind but for the huge slippery leeches that patrol its vicinity, screaming for dad once they sense a player.
RADAR PING
Horrible though these mobs are (it’s best not to play during lunch, as a rule) they’re easily
“HER TOP HALF HAS POPPED OPEN LIKE A GONE-OFF PACKET OF PRINGLES.”
dealt with once you’re familiar with their weaknesses. Their function isn’t to kill hunters but to act as the map’s alarm system. Some players enter alone, others work together in squads of two or three, but you’ll rarely know exactly where they are or how many are left. Like the Meathead, you’re listening out for fumbles in the dark, relying on the Hive’s screams or the rumble of distant dynamite as a crude form of radar. What you do with that information is a matter of tactical taste: you could ambush a battle-beaten duo as they leave the lair of a boss spider, taking their hardwon bounty, or circumvent them entirely to investigate the whereabouts of a different boss in less-disputed territory.
While your goals are simple and unchanging, those delicious layers of complication – the conflicting desires of self-preservation and greed – ensure that no match or rival is ever predictable. They turn Hunt into something distinct and unflatteringly human.
In places the game is simply too complicated. You’ll spend a long time figuring out health bars, which vary in length and number according to which character you’re playing, and sometimes can’t be restored for reasons only Crytek understands. In other areas, though, it’s oversimplified; the Quickplay option, which drops the monsters in favour of capture points, isn’t nearly as engrossing as the main game. But stick to the main event and you’ll find a uniquely-paced shooter worth holding off the Pringles for.
VERDICT
A return to form for Crytek that defies busy FPS norms. Like its ’orrible spiders, Hunt: Showdown is constantly shifting and very hard to put in a box. Get yourself online and join in the hunting fun. Jeremy Peel