Hunt: Showdown 1896 (XS) - Review

by Lee Mehr , posted on 17 September 2024 / 3,049 Views

"But can it run Crysis?"

It's rather interesting how what was once a ubiquitous phrase in PC gaming circles circa the late 2000s about developer Crytek's eye for visual fidelity has changed to a new emphasis: sound design. In today's age, technological advancement in shooters is less about what's seen but rather what's heard. The oohs and ahs of crisp money shots in a dense jungle – with glistening god rays filtering through each palm frond – have been replaced by specific and textured aural details: a heavy boot cracking a nearby tree limb, the distant shrieks of a lame horse alerted by loud footsteps, the loud jangling of stringed cans hanging form a door jamb, and so on. Perhaps it's poetic justice then that Crytek's first step away from graphics-intensive myopia results in something more mechanically and thematically interesting than the rest of its oeuvre.

Of course, it's also important to note this isn't a late review of the original Hunt: Showdown but of the newly-minted 1896 revision. In keeping with expanding technological ambitions, Crytek's wish to transplant Hunt to CryEngine 5.11 also meant delisting the PS4 and Xbox One versions and shuttering their servers, with all original owners receiving the updated version for free. Similarly to Gigantic: Rampage Edition, it's a formal reintroduction of the original's template, with certain tweaks and additions that give it a new identity; unlike Rampage Edition, certain alterations work against the player experience.

For the uninitiated, picture this: the fowl 19th-century Louisiana swamplands filled with undead hordes shambling about and greater monstrosities tucked away at random landmarks. You and your posse (max of three) gather up somewhere around the map's edge, skulking for nearby clues to whittle down the possible spots for where your main target rests, eventually narrowing down to one guaranteed option. But, of course, you're not the only party interested in taking the bounty. As both sides square off, another squad comes out of nowhere and unceremoniously wipes out your team. You're dead, with all of your weapons and accoutrements left for the winners to grab if they so please. No one said the extraction shooter life would be easy.

Naturally, it's all about preparation. Although sometimes incorrectly labeled as a Battle Royale in the past (even from press outlets), a key delineation is that not everyone is on the same foot. While materiel, ammo, and consumables may be found across the map in limited quantities, equipping yourself with a main weapon, sidearm, healing items, fire bombs, and more will translate into how you wish to maneuver across the world. Given the heightened stealth emphasis and the epoch it's emulating, standard bows and crossbows are worthy substitutes to firearms versus acting as cool aesthetic flourishes in the modern age. Each inventory choice (big and small) is deliberate.

Everyone is on the same footing with regards to information, however. It's initially unclear how far or close other gangs are in this vast expanse. The only helpful hint from the map is whether there are one or two big bounties at the start – their potential houses divided with a rough red line. Disinterring their whereabouts happens by interacting with glowing clumps of ash set near or inside ramshackle buildings, each one filtering the potential search area before the third one hones in on their exact whereabouts. Of course, this only peels back one layer of intel; there's no telling if other crews gathered clues faster or perchance happened upon the lair altogether, that is until some crew begins banishing said monster's soul, pinpointing the location to everyone in the process.

Not everything will be readily known to players, but that's where the possibility space with player inference and deduction comes into play. Every human squad is – ironically – treated like a virus in a living organism. Alert a murder of crows or a sord of mallards and they'll fly away, ensuring the whole map hears it. Same concept for half-dead horses or cows, who'll keep whinnying or mooing lest you land a killing blow, which also means you're leaving another sign of your trail behind. Most zombies are mere fodder for your knuckle-dusters or melee weapon, but their corpses may leave a breadcrumb trail to your rear flank. The clumsier hunter might take serious damage from a pack of hellhounds or an immolator's explosive send-off; even those acclimated to every grunt's tactics still have to worry about them because they're auditory signals for any nearby team to investigate. There's a genuine appeal to stealth, but such caution can put you behind everyone else racing to the big showdown.

With the rare exception of The Butcher, stealth isn't a valid option for Bosses. It's typically a battle of attrition while kiting in and out of their lair until you finish them. While it's easy to get accustomed to the tactics, at least their personalities feel unique: a giant spider crawling across the wall, a hooded stranger flinging barbed wire every which way, and so on. After its soul has been reclaimed and the bounties (two for each big boss) picked up, there's a new dynamic for the haves & have-nots. For the haves, five full seconds in Dark Sight (Hunt's "Detective Mode"), where any enemy players within 150 meters show their heat signatures; for the have-nots, their Dark Sight vision will reveal any enemy who's claimed a bounty with a continuous "lightning beacon" until egressing from the map. Now the endgame is about you successfully securing and getting said bounty/bounties to one of the few extraction points scattered around the map.

Although this overarching structure makes for a tantalizing jaunt, the smaller details within the broad strokes make Hunt much more than that. For the sake of convenience, I'll break them down into bullet points:

Gunplay feels so raw and authentic because of how the level design does its damnedest to limit your sense of safety; convenient gaps in a fence or barn wall, crouching to shoot between a train track and a resting train, and other pixel-peak angles keep your head on a swivel.
The give 'n take around your character either having a few big, small, or mixed health bars. Each revive of your character costs a health bar, so small chunks are helpful to potentially get an extra resurrection; conversely, it's easier to fully recover big chunks of health without any meds, so long as damage taken doesn't dip below said chunk.
Preventing people from resurrecting dead teammates by burning the bodies and countering that with choke bombs.
The punitive perma-death, making your time and money spent acquiring perks, amassing the proper gear, and so on feel robbed from you. But I – paradoxically – mean that in a good way, as though that sting hardens you as you either re-purchase said character or try someone else.
The potential inclusion of Minor Bosses (carrying one bounty token), who don't hide within a lair but rather casually lurk somewhere within the wider world. While they're easier to kill and quicker to banish, that underlying PvPvE tension out in the open creates a special level of discomfort.
The way Dark Sight is also used for seeing clues or signaling if another nearby crew is also near a boss' lair.

I liken Hunt's intricacies to the story of a professor who kept filling his "full" cup: first with rocks, then pebbles, then sand, and then water. There's that constant reiteration of filling the world beyond its already-suitable baseline concept.

That illustration can be tangibly felt through your own multiplayer adventures. Perhaps that seems a tad hyperbolic, but it genuinely feels like magic when the interlocking parts come together. I can't think of another shooter that makes a protracted half-hour gunfight, most of which I'm watching through my last surviving partner, such an exciting event. Because of his survivalist skill set, the diving, ducking, and weaving to eventually revive me resulted in us responding by nearly wiping that squad (one barely escaped) and leaving with some spoils. So many compelling stories stem from one domino falling and quickly catenating into a wild series of events, all thanks to those extra elements.

And though the first paragraph adequately portrays Crytek's different design emphasis today, Hunt is still a visual marvel in its own right. Of course, that comes with special considerations: a middle-market shooter ($30 retail) simply isn't showcasing the modern-day equivalent of a Crysis 3 tech trailer; instead, those visual talents are amplified through smaller stuff rather than well-rendered cinematics. From the wonderful hand-drawn art for each perk to enemy design, so many little visual touches go into instilling the occultist backdrop. But perhaps Crytek's best visual work would be the antique gun porn with dazzling details that avoid modern-day customizations tropes. This isn't an era of anime slop graffitied to your side holster (no offense Valorant); instead, it's ivory-plated grips, meticulous engravings painted with gold, and other decorative choices that certainly embellish the era while still honoring it.

From beginning to end, Hunt's extraction dynamics place it in the first-person shooter pantheon in my books, because it's not simply about various qualities clicking into place – which they do – but the rich presentation surrounding them. The voodoo-suffused aesthetic married with its atmospheric world-building, the votive pledges you give to any of the various cults, the powerful soundtrack, and more all congeal into something that seems impossible to replicate without blatantly plagiarizing. Of course, other extraction shooters (or extraction modes) with their own nuances do and will exist, but it's hard to imagine one that'll marry audio/visual design, gunplay, tone, and world-building as well as Hunt: Showdown.

Naturally, this leads one to wonder how 1896 fares in upholding that legacy. With respect to its visual and audio leaps, it's an impressive upgrade. This is exemplified through Hunt's new map: Mammon's Gulch. While still suffused with occultist themes, the background change from humid marshes to vast Colorado forest is a welcome one. The different natural elevations, along with the mines cutting through its center, are a nice diversion to the three original maps. Past the lovely vistas, improved character models, and richer textures, Crytek is once again directly competing against Ninja Theory's binaural audio technology; in fact, there's a good argument that the distinctive gun sounds from various distances are more technically complicated than Senua's psychosis.

With the expected virtues of this update also come a couple of surprising sins. Most immediate of them being the Call of Duty-esque sanitized UI layout. You have to wonder what those meetings looked like: "1896's new menu should take inspiration from Windows 11." That reference to Windows isn't an accident either, with various game-breaking glitches abound! While I won't embellish them as being incredibly frequent, and Crytek did release a video about fixing the UI, it's still an unnecessary nuisance. On the other hand, something more endemic to gunplay is the new arrival of bullet drop. While my playstyle didn't typically have to wrestle with this inclusion, it's a misguided idea because of how often players use iron sights. Implicitly advantaging scoped weapons from the start and needlessly tweaking a purposeful characteristic doesn't make sense; hell, one of Crytek's old design docs thoroughly explains why they didn't implement it and that still makes perfect sense today.

Aside from the aforementioned $30 price point, Hunt isn't shy about microtransactions, as well as pricier Deluxe ($50) and Premium ($60) Editions. While the Legendary hunter and weapon skins look absolutely stunning, there's no dancing around Crytek's semi-avaricious tendencies. While true that Blood Bonds (purchasable currency) can be acquired through objectives, it doesn't have the even hand of Helldivers II. It may not measure up to the MTX insanity of Call of Duty either, but a fairer pricing structure would be in sight with just a few tweaks: bigger reward payouts through play, lower bundle costs, and a cheaper battle pass.

Hunt: Showdown will go down in the annals of not merely extraction shooters, but of first-person shooters in general. Hunt: Showdown 1896 will (currently) go down as an… appreciated-if-also-misguided expansion/revival that's capable of reaching those empyrean heights in due time. Past the nettlesome launch-window complaints, certain design nuances – both on and off the map – lead to something that partially dampens its legacy in understated ways. At the same time, most of the fundamentals that made Crytek's shooter what it is still result in some of my favorite multiplayer memories in recent history.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.