Hunt: Showdown 1896 is a big revision of the original Hunt: Showdown, which was released way back in 2019. For those not familiar, it’s a PvPvE extraction shooter featuring zombies, hunting down a selection of bosses, and a bunch of gunslinger types who want to kill all the aforementioned things as well as you. It’s also got some very cool ideas behind it, such as a heavy reliance on audio cues and spatial sound to pinpoint where other players are, but alas, some of these cool ideas fall apart in a multiplayer game.
The set-up is fairly straightforward, as you and up to two other hunters head into a zombie-filled map to find clues that will lead you to a big monster to kill. You must then banish that monster and collect its bounty tokens, which takes time and gives other hunters your location so they can hunt you down, and steal your bounty tokens – very rude, if you ask me. It’s an extraction shooter, except the things you’re extracting are, I guess, bits of a giant spider, or whatever boss you were lucky enough to get instead. I honestly love the idea, but the reality is a bit less exciting.
The first boss I encountered was the aforementioned spider, and what a spider it was – taller than me, nine feet long, hairy, and scuttling all along the ceiling and walls at a horrific pace. The sounds it makes are the worst part, accurately giving the impression it’s crawling around you when you’re wearing headphones.
The spatial audio is vital throughout, as while you’re finding these clues and fighting this boss, the gunshots and explosions will make an awful lot of noise and draw other groups of players to you. The quieter you are, the safer you are. In addition to shooting and your footsteps, they can also hear any noise traps you might trigger – things like dying horses in the road, flocks of crows, and dogs in a kennel all make noise if they notice you, giving your position away. With a pair of headphones, you can pinpoint the direction they come from and know that there’s likely enemies over there well before you see them. The sound design and the use of spatial sound in this game is truly excellent.
As great as it sounds, it has mostly led to frustration. You can keep your distance from noise traps to avoid triggering them, but there’s often many of them clustered together directly in your way, and sometimes they trigger from further away than you thought they did last time, somehow. This, combined with certain zombies, can make sneaking around more of a chore than a thrill.
The Hive, a zombie with a beehive stuck in its chest that attacks from range demands you have a silent ranged weapon with you or you will be forced to shoot and draw attention to yourself. Its bees also deal poison damage, which prevents you from healing until it stops taking health away from you, which you either have to wait out or heal with an antidote. Meanwhile, the Immolator is a zombie that explodes into flames and charges once pierced by bullets or knives, but I don’t know how many blunt strikes it takes to kill with my fully charged melee because I got to four before it had taken three quarters of my health and then just shot it out of sheer frustration. Fire and bleed both need to be stopped by holding square before they kill you, which just isn’t engaging. Just yet another thing passively draining my health and slowing me down as if the movement speed wasn’t abysmally slow as it is.
Every piece of your equipment costs Hunt Dollars. I started with 8000 Hunt dollars I believe, but now have about 3000. Each time you die you’ll lose all your equipment and, once you reach level 11, you’ll lose your character and all the traits you’ve unlocked from levelling them up as well. Once I run out of Hunt Dollars, I’ll be without ammo packs, med kits, fire bombs, antidotes, and dynamite, not to mention being stuck with basic free characters and their similarly bare-bones weaponry. In short; a very severe disadvantage. Bounties don’t even reward that many Hunt Dollars, with the best way to earn some being killing other players or engaging with the event that sometimes appears in the center of the map.
To counter this disadvantage, you could hang back collecting stuff whilst you wait for the other groups to kill each other, then swoop in and take out the survivors. Unfortunately there isn’t that much stuff to collect, with most of it marked on the map and most buildings just being completely empty, making exploring feel pointless. Many players are also content to just sit in the building they fought the boss in forever. They’ll wait until they’re sure they’ve murdered everyone with their much better sight lines whilst you’ve got to see them through a window and headshot them in the split second they’re visible or try to navigate through all the noise traps and actual traps they have placed.
I’ve been hunting down someone only to find that they were just camping inside a large bush where they simply can’t be seen from outside. They were there for almost five minutes whilst I painstakingly snuck my way over to them, completely still, next to their team mate who I had already downed, and invisible to me because all I could see was their bush.
That’s the issue with this type of cool gameplay idea. When there’s lots of players it gets abandoned because it’s not efficient to play that way. If you sneak you won’t make noise, but you’ll spend fifteen minutes slowly making your way around and then you’ll either have to dash madly towards bounty holders anyway or keep sneaking and lose them. You’re much better off sprinting around because being careful and engaging properly with the sound mechanics is too large of a disadvantage, especially since there’s horses and cows constantly going off anyway because everyone else is sprinting around.
The shooting itself has its share of issues as well. Now, reloading is extremely slow. If someone were to reload like this in real life I’d suggest they switch to using swords or something, it’s so slow it almost feels passive aggressive. But beyond that, there’s also some latency and hit detection issues. In addition to having played a few matches with a big red lag warning in the corner of my screen though without any actual signs of lag like rubber banding and desync, I’ve also aimed directly at a player’s head whilst they were completely still and missed. Additionally, I’ve very obviously missed shots only to find that they mysteriously still connected. This could be part of the lag, it could be poor hit detection, I don’t know, but I do know it’s annoying and quickly converts the tension in gunfights into frustration.
On top of this, there’s a lengthy list of issues with the game’s UI and menus, despite it being overhauled with this update. Navigating around the menus is always a pain, sometimes it’s unclear where things are, where you’ll end up when you press a button, what a button will do, or even what UI elements mean. When choosing traits for your characters, there are a few icons on some of them that we could not find an explanation for in-game. You can’t highlight them, there isn’t a key, eventually we had to google them because we thought they would tell us why we couldn’t equip them. It turns out you have to find them in-game before you can equip them, something the game didn’t tell us outside of an icon without a description. They’ve even removed the Encyclopedia, which had all the background information about types of zombies and the world and so on, so that just isn’t in the game it belongs in anymore apparently.
Speaking of removing things, this new map – Mammon’s Gulch – is pretty nice, though not as nice as you might expect from Crytek. It’s got quite a few distinct areas, though two of those are both burned out wastelands, and a lot of verticality with all the hills, mountains, and mines/caves. It looks good, it just doesn’t have the wow I’ve previously associated with Cryengine. But they’ve also removed the other three maps from the game temporarily for some reason, initially for a month but now for an undisclosed time longer than that. That means you get one map for more than a month, ensuring less variety in the game than there was before this revitalising patch.
Then there’s bugs and frustrating traversal issues. In addition to walking painfully slowly and sneaking/crouching being even more painful, you can usually vault over things in this game, but I guarantee whilst you’re sneaking through the undergrowth you’ll come upon a waist high rock or ledge that you inexplicably can’t vault over. This totally ruins the sneaky vibe and your immersion as you have to go around or stand and jump to get up it, exposing yourself to anyone you might’ve been sneaking up on. Hunters also sometimes leave some chunks of their guns floating in the air around extraction points once they’ve been extracted, whilst sometimes the gun models don’t load even whilst playing, which is poor and a minor disadvantage to other players as that gun sticking up off their back could give away their position if they were, as a random example, hiding in a bush. And then there’s slow matchmaking and even occasional failures when inviting another player into my party, the only reliable way around this being to restart the game for both of us.