Hunt: Showdown 1896

As much as a triumph the Final Shape was, I missed a trick in my Destiny 2 review - that being the fact that the new player experience in Destiny is one of the worst in all of gaming. It was something I had meant to address when drafting ideas before submitting the review but was so impressed by the highs the DLC delivered that I forgot to add that caution to anyone that hadn't already checked in during the last ten years. I am noting it here only because my neglect was repaid with interest in the Hunt: Showdown 1896. Nothing was more difficult in this game than just getting started.

Things aren't dire out of the gate. There is a pretty decent tutorial where a 19th century Geralt of Louisiana walks you through the major mechanics, enemies, and gives you a chance to pop off a few rounds from various weapon types. Some finer points aren't really well covered - like how long your sixth sense mechanic, Darksight, takes to run out. However, overall it does well to show you how to navigate into and through a level.

Things start falling apart as soon as you leave that tutorial and are greeted with as oversaturated a main menu as you'll find anywhere. Anyone who's had to wade through the swamp of Activision's Call of Duty series the last few years will instantly recognize it as a confusing billboard meant mostly to advertise various paths to the online store. The top banner is of course reserved for whatever is "on sale" and the links to the battle pass are plastered into tiles on just about every other row of options. The most confusing thing is that it's not even clear how you pay money in this game, because while it's plain as day that amongst the currencies Blood Bonds are the more rare and the one you can top up from the online store, the tile to buy packs is a dead link that returns an error and the other option to get to the PSN from the Actions menu was greyed out. I guess the price really must be paid in blood rather than dollars, I don't know? I do know that Blood Bonds can also be earned in-game through bounties and other means of reward. 

But there is still much more to scratch your head at once you get past all the links to a storefront that won't let you spend money. Blood Bonds are obviously named because of the shiny "Blood Bond Packs" button, but there are many more on-screen icons that make little sense to the uninitiated. Drawing your attention to the top-left of the screen, there is another currency I nicknamed "double skulls" that seem plentiful and are used to buy gear for your character before loading into a match. I would later learn those are actually officially called "Hunt Dollars" but as the game has no interest in advertising the name then double skulls should do for now. Then next to the double skulls is the single skull. No clue what that is for. Then there is a little medal looking thing, also wholly unexplained. I'm going to call them skull medals for consistently in my naming conventions even if someone forgot to put a skull on it.

To the game's credit it is pretty easy to understand how to get into a game despite the two game modes being a wee bit obfuscated, just appearing as regular old tiles in amongst all the rest of the storefront propaganda. Really though it's not hard to locate nor is it hard to understand how each works based on the descriptions and details leveled at you in the tutorial or upon selection. You've got Bounty Hunts, which is the main game, paired with Soul Survivor, the dedicated solo mode where the player who wins gets to keep the random hunter they load in with. 

Which introduces a core mechanic of the Hunt - death matters. This is an extraction shooter after all and there needs to be stakes to extracting or not. The goal of the Bounty Hunts are to follow clues to locate boss monsters, take them down, exorcise their souls, grab a bounty token from their now exorcised corpse, and make your way to the extraction point; all without dying to the many minor mobs or other PvP players looking to swipe your bounty from your own corpse. You don't have to play the objective, and can choose to play it safe and extract even without a bounty, but of course your rewards will be minimal to match your courage. You can play solo, but most play in teams of two or three, and before the Bounty Hunt you select which combinations are available in your game lobby. Die, and you'll not only collect half the XP and lose everything you've collected in your run, but also the character, or hunter, itself. You can use the double skull bucks to buy new hunters if you run out of characters, or hop in the Soul Survivor to try and earn one by beating the boss and defending the corpse until the timer runs out. This all plays out across the infected bayous of Louisiana and, with the latest update, the mountains and mines of Colorado as well. 

For new players there are protections in place. I believe it's not until you reach rank 11 that dying in a match causes you to also lose the character. So there is forgiveness for the uninitiated. Which is good not only to give space to learn some mechanics but also because the game and loadout screen itself is an assault of information. Beyond all the funny symbols and double skull tokens you are thrown into the deep end with too many weapons, weapon options, traits and other pieces of info littering the character screens; and little to no explanation or guide as to what it means or how it compares. It took me way too long to even figure out how to compare one gun to another when thinking about swapping a loadout. You select the loadout slot of the currently equipped weapon, but instead of intuitively just jumping into a comparison with your other options, the option to Compare is buried in the Actions menu. Try and look post-match at a given game and more jargon fuel is tossed into the information overload fire like MMR. Traits themselves seem pretty important, giving tangible bonuses to things like movement, stealth, and survivability; but they too are inundated with symbols and icons - red, white, or blue without clarity at what each means. Why can I equip one trait and not another, nothing in the user interface seems to unlock the puzzle. 

I wanted to jump in and just enjoy the game so I did my best to ignore it all and do just that. And welcome to the skill gap. I chose duos for my first go and was matchmade with another. I tried to follow their lead, killed a few wandering enemies, cleansed a clue, and we both died promptly upon running into our first set of opposing duos. I think I got a shot off, it did not connect. But I felt bad knowing that my partner just lost his character due to my lack of experience and general incompetence. I'm not ready for the game and others are paying the price for it. So I switched over to Soul Survivor to try and get more in tune with the ropes, but it turns out over there there is no matchmaking protection and old pros were able to locate and extract before I could even catch up to the objective. 

Eventually I turned to the only lifeline I had left: Google. It was pretty obvious that after the excellent tutorial of the core mechanics, there was so much more to the Hunt that the game itself lacked the facilities to actually teach me. It reminded me very much of jumping into my first Soulsborne title, and like that time before, the game's community held the key. Whether it was helpful getting started YouTube videos from content creators (like the one embedded below), or even Steam discussion threads like this one where one poster noted in the Hunt Discord they like to joke "the first 1000 hours of Hunt are tutorial", an understanding of the game finally began falling into place. Turns out that single skull, that's my bloodline rank - the very thing I level up before my hunters start dying for realsies. Skull medals are how many times I have prestiged. MMR is matchmaking rank, a form of ELO to balance lobbies and determine who is most likely to win based on previous performance. Those trait icons: red is a "burn trait" - limited use; white has an extra bonus when used solo above and beyond when used in a team; blue is a "scarce trait" - only found in-game, cannot be purchased pre-game.

So thankfully, while the game's world is infected with a sickness that produces monsters, the game's community appears to be infected with a passion to make sure there is an opportunity to get involved in it, even it that takes you those 1000 hours. And while that serves as a genuine introduction to the larger game beyond the provided tutorial, there is not a complete consensus on certain matters - most notably how to actually get started playing. A little later in that same Steam community thread I linked above you get back to back comments of "Trust me, playing solo makes everything easier in this game." followed by "The game is not meant to be played alone, especially for new players." So which is it? Because there is a rather excellent game buried beneath this inaccessibility to newcomers. 

Weapons and items are plentiful, varied, and mostly ascribe to what was available in the 19th century. Pistols require a hammer pull between shots. Rifles often only load a bullet at a time. Shotguns have two barrels. Machine guns won't be invented until the trenches of a World War that hasn't yet happened and do not exist in this game. The pace of a gunfight is intentional and every round that leaves your weapon becomes meaningful. The community largely does agree that every weapon can be lethal in the hands of a skilled operator, from the base set to the most expensive new items unlocked in the battle pass. Headshots now always kill in a single round, but placing any shot is vital as missing is literally life and death stuff, not just because it takes so long to get that next shot off, but also because many encounters play out before the prey even realizes they are in the crosshairs of the predator. Lose that element of surprise and not only will the crack of the gunpowder and whiz of the bullet flying by alert the target that they are under fire, but they have every chance to duck behind cover, heal any flesh wounds, and turn the tables in reply.

Sound alone can give the encounter away. I don't think I've ever played a game that employed sound so well. The maps are littered with obstacles; be it chains slung from doorways to rattle as you brush past or all manner of debris on the ground to crunch beneath your boots. Water slows progress as you slosh on through. Animals bark, quack, caw, moo, and neigh at your passing and sometimes even flutter into the sky adding a visual pinpoint to the auditory betrayal. As a new player it's exhilarating but you quickly find this is not a game where you must crawl to every point on the map. If you can't find a balance of when to move quickly and when to crouch and creep you will notice opponents have outpaced and are busy completing objectives having left you some distance behind. 

That all adds up to a rather incredible, high stakes gameplay. But as such it also later plays out... often... very... slowly... Players might rush the early obstacles to gain positioning, but much of the late game seems to be spent waiting for their opponents to make a mistake, or painstakingly making sure no ambush is waiting at an extraction or choke point en route. Making sure every body is burned less the Necromancer perk raise a solo player from the grave on your unsuspecting six and stab you in the back, quite literally. 

I play a few Bounties and Soul Survivor matches. I do alright, but I am at a noticeable skill disadvatage and I feel bad being a burden to any matchmade team. Solo seems considerably harder as a new player but Necromancer makes a big difference and adds a little forgiveness. I manage to kill my first real PvP opponent and even stumble into and extract a bounty. But as I start to actually observe my lobbies after the fact I start to realize the odds are really stacked out of my favor.

Wait times to get in to a match to begin with were longer than I was happy with. Whether playing middle of the day or peak hours at night it always took a decent spell to actually find a match. The most obvious culprit could be lack of opportunity with low numbers actually engaging, but I think the MMR rankings and balance might be more at fault. Because when I started watching kill cams after my inevitable demise and cycling through the player rank and prestige post-match I noticed what appears to be a significant disparity in player experience. Lobbies do separate on MMR ranks and try and prevent pub stomping with high (4 MMR stars and up) and low (3 and below) players never even meeting. But in the first match I noted I was downed by a duo of rank 100s (max rank before prestige) while the rest of viewable lobby were up to prestige 5 or at least rank 50 or above. The next match was more of the same. In a lobby of 12 players everyone was rank 100, some with 3-5 prestiges, except for one solitary low rank duo, and of course my lone survivor cannon fodder ass. So I'd wager the lobby wait times might be a direct result of the game desperately searching for better matchups it just can't find end eventually settles on throwing me up against level 100s and multi-prestige players. 

What compounds this balancing disparity is that there is no convenient place to actually get up to speed, except to slog through match after match. The issue here is that in a PvEvP type game, if the gap you need to bridge is the PvP, then you have to patently wade through significant time playing the PvE portion (grabbing clues, sprinting past mobs, moving towards the objectives) until you finally get proximity to the other real players to engage with the PvP. But if it's all just to be cut down quickly, you're back at the start facing the investment of those PvE minutes all over again before you can put another PvP encounter into your crosshairs. It's an inefficient way of getting any valuable experience, to say the least. If I had some friends along for the ride, I feel like everything would be much simpler. We could hop into the shooting range and even test out some not-so-friendly fire in the training map. We could even just hop into matches and race through those PvE sections all the quicker in tandem for real world experience. Back to the solo vs team debate, I think both might have been right, but at different ends of the curve. Inexperienced players really need to be in a group, but more experienced players benefit from running solo as they won't suffer any mistakes of their teammates and can cash in on the solo trait bonuses. Less experienced teams might still land in unbalanced lobbies but we could learn together in duos or trios and not feel bad at tanking the matchmade partners run, ending their hunter. Unfortunately, that's just not my lot in life as I rarely have other people to play with on my gaming schedule. 

What it basically boiled down to was this: on my last night of playing before typing out this very review I had wanted to give the game one more go, and had about an hour to spare late at night facing the inevitability of an early alarm the next morning. I hovered over the tile for the Hunt, but saw Vampire Survivors from my last review just adjacent and ended up spending the whole of my time available on that game instead. I think as a new player and a solo player that decision best sums up my feelings - I'd rather just play something else instead. There is such an element of the same feelings I had back in my Helldivers 2 review: this is the kind of game that begs you to bring a friend or two along, and if you're lacking that the game itself becomes unfriendly, especially to inexperienced players. 

The very reason why the Hunt is in scope for a review is because the latest update was significant. It elevated the game engine to Cryengine 5.11, revamped the UI, added a few new weapons and an entire new location with the Colorado map, a new enemy with the Hellborn and even new fauna like cows and bats. The name itself changed from the Hunt: Showdown to add an 1896 to the end to differentiate between the old and this new version in the free update. So maybe despite these significant upgrades, this still isn't the time to open the gates to new players. These are improvements for Hunt veterans to enjoy (except the UI, everybody seems to hate it old and new alike), until a better path or better lobbies for rookies open up. Because some perma-death protection for a few ranks and unbalanced matches ain't it. 

As far as extraction shooters go, the feel and direction of the game world is creepy and unique. The gameplay mechanics, horror elements, and use of dated weapons create meaningful action. The use of sound is probably the best I've ever seen... heard? I do think the Hunt: Showdown 1896 has an excellent and compelling game under the hood. I also think the hood itself is a gaudy overstuffed menu with a new player experience that is not just lacking in how it throws a player into the deep end, but also in how it doesn't really provide them a sandbox to close the experience gap. There is a community to try and offer a life preserver to the drowning rookie, and some protections in place to limit the damage to the new player, but I feel it needs more if the game seriously wants the player population to open up. Which feels a bit chicken and egg: if there were more new players you could offer better balanced play lobbies to isolate and educate them, but you need a critical mass and steady flow of new players first before you can actually build those lobbies. I will do my level best to rate the game on its own merits, not on how it failed to fit to my particular limitations as an avid solo player. I structured this very review to put my gripes up front because there is this unholy mess of an experience to get to the actual game. But once you are actually in the game, wading through the bayou beset by the unholy hordes of hell instead, well that's the really good part.