Last week, Hunt: Showdown, the horror-tinged extraction shooter, received its largest update since it was released from Early Access about five years ago. This new version, now titled Hunt: Showdown 1896, includes an engine upgrade, revamped UI, additional roaming target, and a whole new map, the first in three years. Hunt is one of the few multiplayer games that keeps me coming back for more, so needless to say I was excited to see what this update would bring to the table.
For those that don’t know, Hunt: Showdown is a PvPvE shooter set in the late 1800s where you are competing with other hunters to track down horrible beasts and safely extract with the bounty. Given the time period of the game, the pace is a lot more deliberate, with slower firing weapons that require bullet by bullet reloading. In addition to making every shot count, you also have to be careful with how much noise you’re making, as stealth is key to getting the advantage on other hunters that you’re up against. It’s tense, punishing, but easily the most rewarding competitive multiplayer game I’ve come across.
So how is the new update? You can’t really talk about it without talking first about the elephant in the room: the audience reaction. Currently, the game is sitting at “Mostly Negative” in the recent reviews section on Steam, with over ten thousand being considered ‘recent.’ If you look at all reviews, it’s still at “Mostly Positive,” so you can see how much of a sharp change has been just from this review. While many of the reviews are citing bugs and performance issues, the majority of the issues stem from the new UI, which has been completely redesigned from the bottom up. It’s not chasing people away, Hunt was setting concurrent player records for the game and seems to be steadily climbing in player count, but the reaction has been swift and extreme. The devs have already put out a video responding to the UI controversy, promising some changes and showing some quick mockups of things they’ve already been working on to help remedy the situation.
Before I launched the game, it was hard to tell if this reaction was warranted or if it was just people complaining about changes that they will probably just get used to in the near future, but I did find some pain points with the new layout. On the bright side, it does look clean and modern, but every action seems to require way more clicks than it used to. Even launching a new match felt like it required more work than it should. Picking your loadout was one of the main problems for me, as there was no way to look at what you have equipped while picking your weapons from the inventory screen. It might not sound like a huge deal, but it’s one of many small things about the UI that add up.
A lot of other menu pages seemed really weirdly balanced with negative space, forcing some of the icons to be too small and hard to parse. The perk page in particular did this to me, and they seemed to be listed in a different order by default, causing me to take way longer to make sense of the page and slow down my hunter upgrading process. I could be wrong about this, but it appears they’ve also removed the monster encyclopedia, which contained all the lore for the game’s many creatures. As a video game lorehound, I always appreciated this feature and definitely will mss it, especially with the introduction of a new roaming boss.
This new boss is called the Hellborn, a massive fire-ball throwing humanoid creature. After last year’s Rotjaw, the Hellborn is the second roaming target, a boss monster that does not have a specific lair and instead can be found in open areas of the map. Instead of finding clues to track it down like a traditional boss, you listen for its screams while you’re using Dark Vision to narrow down its location. This means it can be a bit harder for you to locate it, but when you do it’s a pretty fun fight. Since the Hellborn’s main attack is throwing massive fireballs, it’s a boss you’ll really want to take out a distance, which feels cool to do in an open area rather than a lair fight. It is a very loud creature, meaning the risk of having other hunters run up on you while you’re fighting is something you’ll need to take into consideration, adding another layer of decision making to the encounter. Overall, I have more fun with this guy than I did with Rotjaw, which always felt more time consuming if you didn’t get the drop on it correctly.
The big centerpiece of this update for me, and probably most players, is Mammon’s Gulch, an all new map, bringing the total map count up to four. It walks the line between feeling like a genuinely new place and still fitting within the existing style of Hunt: Showdown. It’s the first map that takes place outside of the Louisiana setting, bringing you to a mountainous location in Colorado. It’s wonderful to have new locations to learn, offering surprises both in the visual and level design elements. There was a really wonderful burned down town that took my breath away the first time I saw it, and scattered oil derricks add a great visual variety. While other maps had some tunnel sections added to them, the mines in Mammon’s Gulch are extensive and fun to traverse, feeling both claustrophobic and just big enough to have a satisfying firefight in. One of the great joys of the game is learning the ins and outs of the locations to figure out how to use their layouts to your advantage, so having a whole new map is extremely exciting.
Aside from the obviously new visual assets that were made to build out Mammon’s Gulch, it’s clear that the visuals have been upgraded in the new engine. The lighting and water effects in particular look better to me, making an already pretty game even more beautiful. I have noticed some performance issues in my matches, and many recent Steam reviews seem to be seeing these as well, but I’m guessing this has more to do with the server issues cropping up due to the high volume of players. There were definitely lag spikes that I was experiencing from time to time that hurt my play experience, and I kept getting disconnected when I was trying to play duos with my buddy, which was frustrating to say the least.
To draw people in and reward players, there’s a new event going on called Scorched Earth. This features some new player perks, along with a battle pass that has new weapons and skins for players to earn. Even without buying the premium battle pass, there’s some nice things to earn, and the new perks are a fun way to add wrinkles to the familiar gameplay.
While there are some issues with the new UI, I think the negative reaction has been a bit overblown. Aside from the connection issues which will hopefully be ironed out soon, the Hunt: Showdown 1896 update feels great to me, and I can’t wait to continue to explore and learn everything that Mammon’s Gulch has to offer. It provides a change of scenery that reinvigorates the game without feeling out of place in the game’s world, featuring great level design and art direction. It’s an exciting new era for Hunt, and I’m sure that Crytek can smooth out the annoyances of the UI now that it’s out in the wild and they can see players interacting with it. I’m really hoping that the review bombing doesn’t dissuade new players from checking it out, because it feels like all the new additions make an excellent game even better.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 is now available for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series. Previous owners of Hunt: Showdown on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will automatically receive an upgrade to the new version at no additional cost on their current-gen counterpart, including all past purchases and progress.
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