Today's games are incredibly realistic Hunt: Showdown

Hunt: Showdown wants you to feel panic. There’s the panic that ensues when the echoes of your gunshots ring out in the forest around you, potentially attracting monsters and players. Then there’s the panic of trying to franticly escape a level with a prize before other players track you down. And finally, the panic and frustration of losing one of your hunter characters who’d amassed a hefty stash of gear over multiple successful hunts, all because you were careless around a pack of zombie dogs. It’s an addictive type of panic that, when everything clicks, is wholly unique and exhilarating in a way that no other game can be.

Hunt is an first-person shooter from Crytek with a more nuanced premise than most: You (and your partner, if you bring one) are thrown into a swamp-spattered jungle with minimal supplies and the goal of hunting down and killing a twisted, demonic monster somewhere on a map full of smaller but similarly angry monsters. But it’s not that simple. Not only do you need to kill a monster, you then need to escape while evading other players. It has a very Lovecraftian-meets-Van Helsing setting, which does an excellent job of amping up the tension with some of the most realistic uses of actual darkness I’ve seen in recent memory. Instead of just being a vague, blurry, blueish filter over the screen, nighttime feels like an actual absence of light. With a quality pair of headphones, Hunt delivers the spine-tingling sounds some of the creatures make as they stalk you, and quickly becomes one of the most unnerving games out there.

The monsters offer up a decent challenge and are fun when when all of the elements work in tandem against you. But, as they stand, the boss monsters’ AI needs a lot of work. The butcher, for example, refuses to walk through doorways, so it’s extremely easy to exploit this by running outside and blasting him in the back as he walks away. Of course, this does then run the risk of exposing you to other players waiting for you to exit the building after this trick.

But before you can fight a monster, you’ve got to track them down using your Dark Vision ability, which blacks out the world around you to illuminate a trail that leads to the nearest clue. (Naturally, with so many threats lurking, it’s extremely risky to leave this on longer than you absolutely have to.) Disappointingly, all of the clues are just blackish-blue pits that you hover your hands over for a few seconds before getting the trail for the next clue – effectively a simple pickup. In a sense, the word “clue” is a bit of an overstatement, but each one you find does narrow down the potential location of the monster.

Once you locate the target, you have some important decisions to make. You can go in guns blazing if there aren’t too many enemies nearby or if you’ve got enough explosives and ammo to not care. Otherwise you’ll have to use stealth to stay hidden and carefully plan your approach to each encounter. This is where having a partner to help cover you really comes in handy. When you’ve finally downed one of the named beasts in a partially glitchy battle, you have to banish it to Hell, a ritual which takes time and notifies everyone on the map exactly where you are. Initiating the ritual will shift other players’ tracking senses to focus on your trail instead of the monster’s, and marks your location with a map marker. It’s a clever mechanic that completely flips around the hunting dynamic. You can no longer hide and you no longer have a target to hunt as you enter full-on escape mode, which totally changes the way you play. Few games offer the same sense of exhilaration and panic as a match nears its finale in Hunt.

Whether you’re the hunter or the hunted, teamwork is crucial for covering each others’ backs. That makes playing solo incredibly difficult, to the point where Hunt is one of the few games that I actually preferred playing with a random (and often silent) partner to just going it alone. Loneliness makes Huntmore difficult, but it’s also boring since it can end up feeling like a shallow game of hide and sneak. With a partner, you’re at least emboldened to act more aggressively and decisively.

The competitive side comes from the fact that you’re constantly racing against up to 11 other hunters (with a max total of 12 in a game) to find and kill the target. But it’s more than a deathmatch -- the temptation to shoot first and ask questions later is certainly there, but it can be more beneficial to stalk other players and let them do the dirty work of thinning out enemies themselves (and take some hits in the process) before you swoop in to finish off whoever wins.
And there is a game trailer for you!

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