A rough beast indeed, Hunt: Showdown, slouching toward the daylight after a couple of years in Early Access. A genre chimera, blurring survival horror with boss rush shooter and battle royale, not quite one thing, not quite another.
At a glance you might confuse it with Far Cry 2 – there’s the same malarial background hum, the same flammable brown palette – but in motion it’s closer to PUBG, shunning the clear ground, ears pricked for proximity chat. It has the vivid markings of a Monster Hunter, but those patterns are really just for show, like the eye-whites of a killer whale – masking the gunsights protruding from its abdomen. You certainly wouldn’t call it handsome, but you can’t seem to drag your gaze away. How did something so… ever survive the evolutionary process? But alas, you’ve looked for too long. It knows you’re there now. No, don’t try to run! The creature’s girth is deceptive. We’ll have to see if we can bring it down.
If Hunt: Showdown’s unusual – and, as it turns out, fantastically exhilarating and engrossing – mixture of inspirations has a single guiding principle, it’s that predators become prey. It’s a game in which stepping on a twig while chasing a zombie can get you shot from a hundred yards off, and the time-honoured ceremony of a bossfight offers zero defence against the player lobbing dynamite through a window.
In Hunt, you play patron to a “Bloodline” of bounty hunters, all seeking their fortune amid the rot of a 19th century Louisiana that has been overrun by demons. Your task, in the main bounty-hunting mode, is to find the lair of a legendary monster within one of two festering open world maps, using your sorcerous Dark Vision to chase swirling blue sparks to clues that narrow down the search area. Having slain and exorcised the abomination, you must collect a bounty and head to a map exit to complete the match. Along the way you’ll fight or avoid myriad lesser horrors – from vanilla zombies who can be treated as speed bumps, providing you don’t overlook the ones waving cleavers or torches, to chunkier threats such as the Meathead, a one-armed juggernaut that sees by way of a slithering entourage of leeches.
Hunt: ShowdownDevelopers: CrytekPublisher: CrytekPlatform: PC, Xbox One, PS4 (reviewed on Xbox One)Availability: 18th February 2020
You’ll earn both character XP and coin for slaying these minor foes, but every bullet or firebomb wasted on a demon dog (and every bandage applied to your shredded flesh after discovering that the dog has friends) is one less to pit against the boss itself. There are three of them, right now – you never know which you’re up against before starting a match, so it’s wise not to specialise too much when equipping guns and consumables. The Butcher is the soft option, for all its bulk: a porcine bully armed with a flaming hook, easily slaughtered providing you keep your distance. The knife-wielding Assassin is wilier, dissolving itself into a cloud of flies in order to course through the crevices of barns and windmills; it can even clone itself to distract you, like a lizard discarding its tail. Worst of all, though, is the Spider, a viciously nimble wall-crawler that always seems to be behind or above you, its rattling feet setting your hairs on end. Many hours after first killing one, I still feel the urge to stand on a chair while fighting it.
Thankfully, bosses never leave their lairs, so you can always hurry outside to patch yourself up, scrounge some ammo or take potshots at your quarry through a gap in the boards. Except that you can’t, actually, because the sting in Hunt’s tail is that it’s a competitive affair. There may be other players in the vicinity – as many as a dozen per match, questing in groups of up to three. Enemy players aren’t marked on the HUD or map screen to begin with, but it’s easy to give yourself away while thinning the NPC herd, and as in Turtle Rock’s sadly forgotten Evolve, each map is awash with nefarious ambient warning systems such as patches of broken glass, clattering chains and flocks of tetchy crows. The bossfights, naturally, tend to involve a lot of telltale screaming and explosions, and once you’ve killed the boss, you must banish it to obtain the bounty – a two-minute exorcism ritual that flags your position on the map, giving rivals all the time they need to close in and set up a perimeter. Bounties themselves are visible on the HUD along with their carriers, which often makes exfiltration the most arduous part of the match.
It’s a recipe, all told, for two kinds of dread. On the one hand, there’s the revulsion you feel toward creatures who used to be regular folks and animals: the women whose chests have split to reveal mosquito hives; the men who resemble giant, groaning lumps of decaying coral. This is a fear that abates as you play match after match, memorising AI aggro ranges and unlocking new gear and skills such as blunt impact resistance or faster crossbow reloads. Beyond the first 10 Bloodline levels, hunters and their gear are lost forever when slain, but they are just as swiftly replaced, with one free greenhorn recruit available on the roster screen between matches (you can also buy “Legendary” hunters with real money, but the perks are strictly cosmetic). You learn not to grow too attached, though you can always extract from a round early if you feel totally outgunned.