Hunt Showdown is a first-person survival horror game that incorporates a wild western style PVP with zombies and other horrors. Set in the Louisiana Swamps in 1895 something evil has been festering. Largely ignored by the local’s people begun to disappear and a corruption started to spread. Nothing was done until it was too late.
The people that stayed died to sickness, or by their own hands, which can be seen by the countless people hanging from trees and bridges. It wasn’t until the government incentivised an organisation of people to infiltrate and hunt down the evil lurking in the swamps that something was done. With cash rewards for anyone who brought back a token of the fallen bosses. But while evil corrupts so too does money, and it wasn’t long before it was every man for himself. With the organisation crumbling fellow hunters competed with each other to collect the bounty before anyone else, killing any who would stand between them and the cash reward. The aim of the game isn’t like other games where your goal is to kill everyone, it’s just to survive. There are extracts located on the outskirts of the map where you can extract at any point. But to do so without getting any bounties or points will result in not gaining any reward or XP. It’s a big map and is relatively easy to avoid players if your careful, but if you’re brave enough to go to the bounty you will undoubtedly meet and have to fight enemy players.
Released for Xbox, PC, and PlayStation by Crytek in 2018 hunt showdown is an incredibly immersive game with a small and loyal community backing it up. It’s a very enjoyable game to play with great detail in all its maps, guns, and skins. Its controls feel smooth and easy to use and have similar controls to a lot of other shooters, which a lot of people are used to. It’s probably one of the most unique games I’ve ever played with a horror, PVP and PVE mix, making it like no other game on the market. The combat is also pretty special to the game as you use wild western type weapons that have realistic controls, such as different velocities, penetration, and damage. The damage in the game is also pretty cool as such in real life, a shot to the head will almost certainly kill. Whilst a shot to the leg or arm will just leave you injured. When hit something sharp such as knives, shrapnel, or a bite from one of the NPCs, the character will receive bleeding damage, which if left untreated will kill the player.
Depending on the wound inflected the bleeding damage will be greater or lesser. The last and I feel like the most unique feature to the game is the encouragement to be careful. The game does this by making it hardcore, so when you die that character and all of their equipment is lost making you have to play one of your other characters or even hiring a new one altogether. This incentivises not wasting your life as a careless rush could result in losing your hunter and your guns.
The graphics in the game are very immersive, in my opinion beating, or matching a lot of AAA games released at the time. It’s about to be heavily upgraded as well with a pending engine upgrade promising even better graphics. Though even now the detail in inspecting each gun and the grass and water physics offer an awesome experience.
Sound is by far the most important aspect in the game and arguably the most impressive. The game uses 3D audio so you can help pinpoint locations of enemy players. This also means that staying silent is a must, with so much as a twig snapping giving away your exact position to any players that you’re trying to sneak up on. It also encourages you to only use guns when necessary, such as against enemy players. As with the NPCs its much more favourable to use melee weapons or you risk giving your location away to the whole map. Even the detail in the ambient noises that change ever so slightly getting quieter when players are around.
The replayability is quite cool as once you reach maximum level (100) you have the option to prestige. This resets all of your hunters, equipment and money back to what you start with. In return it gives you a will receive free legendary items, which the only other way to get them is to buy them. These are purely cosmetic as hunt is purely a free to play game (despite the initial purchase) and none of the items available to buy will give the player any combat advantage against others. It’s still a cool way to reset your progress while getting some cool new gear.
While Hunt Showdown is an incredible game it does have its flaws. While I have never experienced this in my near 100 hours of this game, I have heard from people with 1000s of hours that the anti-cheat Hunt showdown uses isn’t very good and while a majority of the lower tier players don’t really experience it the elite players report that they’re countless hackers that they play against, making the game very difficult for them.
I think the future of the game will be interesting. While the engine update will be huge for the game, and will indeed bring in new players, there will not be a massive influx in the player base. This is because while Crytek loves and keeps Hunt well updated they fail to properly advertise it. I only found out about the game from a friend who only found out it existed because of one of his cousins. Even the engine upgrade which is such a big deal for the game has been poorly advertised. While set to release mid 2024 (which is what we are currently in) the exact release date hasn’t been talked about by Crytek, and no hints have been given to when we are to expect the update, or what else it has to offer.
