Hunt: Showdown Review - a sweaty, stinking cat and mouse

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Place the swamp dry.

By combining an open-world monster rush format with pubg-like PVP, Crytek has developed a stealth survival as hardly any other stealth.

In fact, a rough animal, Hunt: Showdown, who approaches the daylight after a few years in Early Access. A genre chimera, blurring the survival shorter with Boss Rush Shooter and Battle Royale and populated by entities that themselves are mergers of people, insects and demons. At a glance, you could confuse it with Far Cry 2 - there is the same malaria backgroundsums, the same flammable brown palette - but in motion it is closer to pubg, avoids the clear ground and peaks the ears for the proximity chat. It has the lively markings of a monster hunter, but these patterns are really just to show how the eyes of a killer whale - it masks the visors that protrude from his stomach. You would certainly not call it good, but you can not pull your eyes away. How did something like that ... mehrere ever survive the evolution process? But unfortunately they have been looking for too long. It knows that you are now. No, do not try to race! The scope of the creature is deceived. We have to see if we can do it.

If Hunt: Showdowns is unusual - and, as it turns out, fantastic intoxicating and fascinating mixing of inspirations has a single guiding principle, then predators become prey. It is a game where you chose a branch for a hundred meters away, while you're looking for a zombie, and the time-honored ceremony of a boss fight does not offer a defense against the player who hurls dynamite through a window.

In Hunt, you play the patronage of a bloodline of bounty hunters looking for all their luck in the midst of a 19th-century Louisiana, which was overrun by demons. Their task in the main mode of bounty hunt is to find the hiding place of a legendary monster on one of two-fold open world maps and hunt with their magical dark vision swirling blue sparks to find clues that restrict the search area. After you killed and exported the ruling, you have to collect a bounty and go to a card exit to finish the match. On the way there they will fight or avoid countless smaller horrors - from vanilla zombies, which can be treated as brake thresholds, provided they do not overlook the scales or torches swinging, to more clumifying threats such as the meathead, a one-armed Moloch that sees that Through a glittered entourage of leeches.

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Hunt: Showdown

• Developer: Crytek
• Publisher: Crytek
• Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4 (tested on Xbox One)
• Availability: 18 . February 2020

You will receive both character EP and coins, if you kill these little enemies, but every ball or fire bomb wasted for a demon dog (and every bandage applied to their tattered meat after they have found that the dog Friends has) is a less to compete against the boss. At the moment there are three - they never know against whom they start before they start a game. It is therefore advisable not to specialize in the equipment of weapons and consumables. The butcher is the soft option, despite its mass: a pig tyrant armed with a burning hook and can be slaughtered slightly, provided they hold distance. The knife swinging assassine is smarter and dissolves in a flying cloud to pull through the columns of barns and windmills. It can even clone myself to distract yourself, like a lizard that poses her tail. The worst, however, is the spider, a malignant flicker wall crawler, which always seems to be behind or above them and whose rattling feet put their hair to mountains. Many hours after the first murder, I still feel the urge to stand in a chair while fighting.

Fortunately, bosses never leave their caves, so they can hurry to hurry outside at any time to mend themselves to collect some ammunition or to make photos through a gap in the boards in their quarry. Apart from that you can not do that, because the engraving in Hunts's cock is that it is a competitive matter. Other players can be nearby - up to a dozen per game looking in groups of up to three players. Enemy players are not marked on the hud or card screen, but it's easy to betray themselves as they thinnish the NPC flock, and as in Turtle Rocks sad-forgotten Evolve is any card with shameful environmental alert systems as patches flooded out of broken Glass, clattering chains and herd of irritated crows. Of course, the boss fights are associated with many treacherous screams and explosions. If you killed the boss, you need to ban it to get the bounty - a two-minute exorcism ritual that characterizes your position on the map and rivals gives you all the time you have to close and set up a perimeter. Objects themselves are visible together with their carriers on the HUD, which makes the expletation often the most difficult part of the game.

All in all, it's a recipe for two types of fear. On the one hand, there is the aversion to creatures that used to be normal people and animals: the women whose breast has split to reveal mosquito poles that forgave you sideways; The men who resemble huge, moaning lumps of rotting corals. This is a fear of playing when you play game for game, remember KI aggro areas and unlock new equipment and skills such as blunt impact resistance or faster recharges of armrests. Beyond the first 10 blood line levels, hunters and their equipment are lost forever when they are killed. However, they are replaced as fast. Between the games is available on the cadre screen a free Greenhorn recruit available (you can also buy legendary hunters with real money.) But the perks are purely cosmetic). They learn not to be affected, even though they can always extract early from a lap when they feel completely overwhelmed.

Which means that it is about the second type of fear, all penetrating, merciless awareness that every moment someone could focus on a weapon on you, somewhere out there in the sweaty blur of the undergrowth, and your position and direction in it reads bird sign , The babbling of your feet (why everything in the world did you take this abbreviation through the swamp?) And the hungry twitch of the nearby zombies. It is a horror that can not be denied or hidden. He is only alleviated by the mere wickedness that they feel when they hear a cough. Turning slowly and spy another player, which caropes with the microphone enabled by a grain field.

You may have liked to feel similar feelings when playing the venerable MMO Shooter Dayz. Hunt might have managed to pack and escape the ethos of the game of betrayal and paranoia in rounds of 30 to 40 minutes each with a clear, overarching rhythm of exploration and struggle. These are outside 30-40 minutes: When 12 players are in the field, it is not unusual that you meet rivals in the first few minutes. If you are more lucky, you may be the only player who is not in this shootout and is all alone and the inhabitants of the map managed at will. But of course you can never guarantee that you are the last person who is still standing. If you are planning to become loud, it's the safest thing to couple as teammates can revive each other at the expense of permanent loss of a healthbar segment.

This fear, to be observed, teaches her to enjoy the wash complexity of Hunts surrounding design. Each feature of this dark landscape is the basis for a tactical dilemma. Building accommodation ammunition or health refunds, but that also means that they meet there rather on other players. Randomly used foggy or nocturnal conditions reduce the fear when breaking the cover, but choose them again if they defend a hiding place during exile. It is advisable to delete the lanterns before risking a look out the window. You may want to use these environmental alarm systems more active and possibly trigger a generator to skip all sounds that make them when sneaking on a motorhome.

Especially boss caves take a double existence in your head. It is anxious to penetrate into them, especially when fighting against the spider whose form - like the Xenomorph - is difficult to recognize the thicket of rusting agricultural tools and the intricate shades of the bars. And then there is the process to defend them during or after banishment, whereupon they become for lurking terror and read the thoughts of invaders. The cry of a woman below shows that a player has awakened near the wrath of a zombie. A creak up indicates that another - with the first allied? - Tapes the tiles. A remote croaks shows that a third approaches north. If the cubes fall in their direction, this approaching players can grab the on the roof while they fall down on the first player down. But they do not worry about the players 1, 2 and 3. the player they are worried is player 4, whom they have not discovered yet, from whom they always have to accept he there is.

I'm not sure if I have played a multiplayer game since Rainbow Six: Siege has created such tensions. Hunts disadvantage, if you can call it, is that it does not offer much alternative to this tension. You can not switch the cards of the game solo, and although there is a QuickPlay option without a boss, this is not quite the emergency relief valve for jitter jitter, as it sounds. Rather, it is a very refined expansion of the character leveling system.

In QuickPlay, you get a random, cursed hunter and need to track three energy sources to activate a mystical source and escape the card. While new weapons can only be looted in the head money hunting new weapons from dead hunters, they find exotic weapons everywhere. You will also receive a random skill for each source of energy that you tap. The result is a tailor-made hero equipped with selected equipment and capabilities that may be above your current bloodline rank. Survive the torture and you can add this character to your list. The hook is that only a hunter can activate and escape the source - and there is nothing more beautiful than the rage when they have fostered their own van Helsing and another player is tearing away the carpet with an exploding crossbow bolt.

Long in the brewery - it began his life at Crytek USA as a kind of Grimm-fairytale spin on Left 4 Dead - Hunt: Showdown makes next to the multiplayer shooters, which dominate the discussion today, a strange, sculking figure. It is decided a note, though every bounty hunt brings a variety of fatal surprises and is deeply unforgiving. Beyond this 10-stage grace period, it has no real interest in that you feel at home. However, these mere insensitivity arouses emotions that simply do not find them in most multiplayer games. The way your pulse jumps when you perceive the echo of shots. The bile in your neck as you monitor the movements of the spider by the wood of a barn. And above all, the terrible triumph, when a birdswarm sets nearby and they target them with their shotgun, just as someone peeks around a wall.