Peak level PvPvE occult-western themed extraction shooter offering a tense grimdark atmosphere, very satisfying gunplay, clever map design and a phenomenal audio system. What you do in this game is you step inside the murky bayou water, you track some sort of demon spawn via a clue system, you find it, you kill it (if it doesn't kill you first), banish it to hell and try to extract the map with a bounty from the monster. It only has a tiny little catch; there's up to 11 other hunters somewhere in the bushes of the 1 square kilometer map tracking you. It doesn't matter that you killed the monster. Whoever extracts with the money, gets the money.

The atmosphere of this game is truly like no other. As you follow the path of death and decay through the Louisiana bayou, you will hear a lot of unpleasant sounds. A pregnant woman's tormented cries as a swarm of bees flies out of her open belly. Something splashing in the water. A thunder in the distance or nearby gunshots, indicating that somebody is very close to you. Or maybe a howl of a half-alive, half-dead dog. You can encounter heavy rain or thick fog on your way. Or maybe you go in at night, sneaking in the darkness. Were those footsteps or just crickets? And even if you see, you will see gruesome things. Everything's dead here, aside from the things (and people) that want to kill you as well. The atmosphere is heavy, unwelcoming and depressing. I never really expected anything like that from a multiplayer FPS, but here we go.

Hunt: Showdown honestly has one of the best gunplay systems and best feeling guns I've ever seen. All the guns feel old, rusty, unreliable, unwieldy, but in a good way. It's hard to learn their strengths and weaknesses, but if you master those tools of death, you will find that it's way more satisfying to blast a Martini-Henry carbine round at your opponent than to spray them with an automatic rifle. Alright, it's probably subjective, but how the weapons feel is only one thing. Hunt: Showdown has a really good balance of weapon strength. Obviously, there are better and worse guns, but every weapon in this game has its place and is viable in some way. Every bullet can instanty kill you to the head (at least to a certain distance), which makes even the cheapest dusty revolver not a terrible choice. If you pay more for your guns (or steal a good gun from a dead body you found where you previously heard some gunshots), you will get something that feels significantly stronger, but by no means overpowered. This game rewards skill, your guns are slow and ammo can be scarce so you have to make every shot count. In the end, the better shot wins, not the better gear. And I love this about the game.

But you don't need to outfight the enemy, you can outsmart them. This is a sandbox game, meaning that nobody can force you to do anything. You can extract right at the start, you can hide in a bush and wait, or play aggresively and push everyone. Clever hunters may set up traps at chokepoints, create audible distractions by imitating a gunfight or throwing decoys, or use the smoke after a dynamite blast to obscure vision and revive their fallen comrade. If you watched a gunfight from afar and decided that you just won't be able to outshoot this hunter, you can lure him into a trap. Or maybe just let him go. You can do whatever you want.

The audio system of Hunt is quite famous for all the right reasons. The binaural audio in this game is something else. I consider myself an experienced hunter and I tell you this: sound is just as important as sight in this game, in some instances probably even more. Sound is everything. Almost every time you can hear an enemy closing in on you before you see them. You can tell someone's near because you heard crows flying away in a distance, or dogs barking angrily in their kennel, or an angered outcry of an immolator who caught a glimpse of something not yet dead. And in close quarters situations, you can pinpoint exactly where your enemy is because of precise footsteps. It helps if you learn the maps;, then if you hear a metallic thud, you know somebody is probably sneaking on that roof over there. Oh yeah, and virtually every action in this game makes audible noise, for example switching weapons. So, good headphones are not only recommended, but practically needed in higher MMR. Bonus points for very unnerving ambient sounds in the lower frequencies, which will purposefully try to deceive you and second guess yourself, whether you really heard a footstep nearby or it was just a grunt of some undead bayou denizen.

It's apparent that I'm a fan of Hunt: Showdown. I could talk for hours about many other great things, like the superb map design (only 3 maps at the moment, but reasonably large, full of details and well designed compounds), the lore (a bit hidden, but interesting), hunter models and consistent bleak style of the game. But the game is not perfect, in fact, far from it. Even though the game is in probably the best state since I started playing, bugs are still a common thing, and some of them are not fixed for prolonged periods of time. Performance of the game isn't the best, the UI is insanely cluttered and the servers are okay at their best and utterly garbage at their worst. Crytek mostly fixed desync issues, which is good because the game used to be almost unplayable in some situations, but the servers are still a thorn in Hunt's foot. For me, it's really not as bad nowadays and mostly stable, however consider yourself warned, this is a lasting issue. I certainly don't think the game is flawless, but I still have massive respect for the devs because their love and passion for this game is obvious and I believe they try their best in fixing issues and listening to the community.

Well, yeah. This is a long one. Let me just say this at the end: You will die. You will lose your hunter and your hard-earned guns in the bayou. Hunt is a hard game. Hunt is an unforgiving game. Hunt is NOT a friendly game. But... It's not meant to be friendly. It's a game about bounty hunting, and it's damn good. Consider buying Hunt and don't be discouraged if you die. Everybody dies. A lot. It takes time to learn the maps, to get used to weapons, muzzle velocity or slow fire rates. But the satisfaction of prevailing, wiping the whole server, saying goodbye to the murky waters as you haul all bounties to extraction... It's immense. See you in the bayou.

TLDR: yee-haw cowboy gun go boom, play the game

Peak level PvPvE occult-western themed extraction shooter offering a tense grimdark atmosphere, very satisfying gunplay, clever map design and a phenomenal audio system. What you do in this game is you step inside the murky bayou water, you track some sort of demon spawn via a clue system, you find it, you kill it (if it doesn't kill you first), banish it to hell and try to extract the map with a bounty from the monster. It only has a tiny little catch; there's up to 11 other hunters somewhere in the bushes of the 1 square kilometer map tracking you. It doesn't matter that you killed the monster. Whoever extracts with the money, gets the money. The atmosphere of this game is truly like no other. As you follow the path of death and decay through the Louisiana bayou, you will hear a lot of unpleasant sounds. A pregnant woman's tormented cries as a swarm of bees flies out of her open belly. Something splashing in the water. A thunder in the distance or nearby gunshots, indicating that somebody is very close to you. Or maybe a howl of a half-alive, half-dead dog. You can encounter heavy rain or thick fog on your way. Or maybe you go in at night, sneaking in the darkness. Were those footsteps or just crickets? And even if you see, you will see gruesome things. Everything's dead here, aside from the things (and people) that want to kill you as well. The atmosphere is heavy, unwelcoming and depressing. I never really expected anything like that from a multiplayer FPS, but here we go. Hunt: Showdown honestly has one of the best gunplay systems and best feeling guns I've ever seen. All the guns feel old, rusty, unreliable, unwieldy, but in a good way. It's hard to learn their strengths and weaknesses, but if you master those tools of death, you will find that it's way more satisfying to blast a Martini-Henry carbine round at your opponent than to spray them with an automatic rifle. Alright, it's probably subjective, but how the weapons feel is only one thing. Hunt: Showdown has a really good balance of weapon strength. Obviously, there are better and worse guns, but every weapon in this game has its place and is viable in some way. Every bullet can instanty kill you to the head (at least to a certain distance), which makes even the cheapest dusty revolver not a terrible choice. If you pay more for your guns (or steal a good gun from a dead body you found where you previously heard some gunshots), you will get something that feels significantly stronger, but by no means overpowered. This game rewards skill, your guns are slow and ammo can be scarce so you have to make every shot count. In the end, the better shot wins, not the better gear. And I love this about the game. But you don't need to outfight the enemy, you can outsmart them. This is a sandbox game, meaning that nobody can force you to do anything. You can extract right at the start, you can hide in a bush and wait, or play aggresively and push everyone. Clever hunters may set up traps at chokepoints, create audible distractions by imitating a gunfight or throwing decoys, or use the smoke after a dynamite blast to obscure vision and revive their fallen comrade. If you watched a gunfight from afar and decided that you just won't be able to outshoot this hunter, you can lure him into a trap. Or maybe just let him go. You can do whatever you want. The audio system of Hunt is quite famous for all the right reasons. The binaural audio in this game is something else. I consider myself an experienced hunter and I tell you this: sound is just as important as sight in this game, in some instances probably even more. Sound is everything. Almost every time you can hear an enemy closing in on you before you see them. You can tell someone's near because you heard crows flying away in a distance, or dogs barking angrily in their kennel, or an angered outcry of an immolator who caught a glimpse of something not yet dead. And in close quarters situations, you can pinpoint exactly where your enemy is because of precise footsteps. It helps if you learn the maps;, then if you hear a metallic thud, you know somebody is probably sneaking on that roof over there. Oh yeah, and virtually every action in this game makes audible noise, for example switching weapons. So, good headphones are not only recommended, but practically needed in higher MMR. Bonus points for very unnerving ambient sounds in the lower frequencies, which will purposefully try to deceive you and second guess yourself, whether you really heard a footstep nearby or it was just a grunt of some undead bayou denizen. It's apparent that I'm a fan of Hunt: Showdown. I could talk for hours about many other great things, like the superb map design (only 3 maps at the moment, but reasonably large, full of details and well designed compounds), the lore (a bit hidden, but interesting), hunter models and consistent bleak style of the game. But the game is not perfect, in fact, far from it. Even though the game is in probably the best state since I started playing, bugs are still a common thing, and some of them are not fixed for prolonged periods of time. Performance of the game isn't the best, the UI is insanely cluttered and the servers are okay at their best and utterly garbage at their worst. Crytek mostly fixed desync issues, which is good because the game used to be almost unplayable in some situations, but the servers are still a thorn in Hunt's foot. For me, it's really not as bad nowadays and mostly stable, however consider yourself warned, this is a lasting issue. I certainly don't think the game is flawless, but I still have massive respect for the devs because their love and passion for this game is obvious and I believe they try their best in fixing issues and listening to the community. Well, yeah. This is a long one. Let me just say this at the end: You will die. You will lose your hunter and your hard-earned guns in the bayou. Hunt is a hard game. Hunt is an unforgiving game. Hunt is NOT a friendly game. But... It's not meant to be friendly. It's a game about bounty hunting, and it's damn good. Consider buying Hunt and don't be discouraged if you die. Everybody dies. A lot. It takes time to learn the maps, to get used to weapons, muzzle velocity or slow fire rates. But the satisfaction of prevailing, wiping the whole server, saying goodbye to the murky waters as you haul all bounties to extraction... It's immense. See you in the bayou. TLDR: yee-haw cowboy gun go boom, play the game