About Hunt Showdown

For all its tension, ugliness and brutality, the overwhelming feeling that Hunt: Showdown provided me with was relief.

Partly this relief was because Crytek has, finally, made a game that I can not only like and enjoy, but also be obsessed by. Crytek has been a major studio from day one, and as strong as the original Far Cry was (one magazine editor, back in those distant times, refused to believe Half-Life 2 could challenge it when I submitted that review), and no matter how ambitious Crysis was, no Crytek game ever claimed five hundred hours of play time on my tight, tight schedule.

Crytek games have always been a tense mixture of technology crashed into not-quite-realised design ideas, but with Hunt it feels like design finally took the laser pointer away from the rest of the team, and the results are a thematically coherent, punishing, thrilling competitive shooter that drags in influences from across contemporary gaming. More importantly than any of that, perhaps, it creates a unique identity. Nothing else is quite like Hunt, and that alone is hugely rewarding.

It’s also this recipe of influences that provides the other part of that sense of relief. The survival genre hasn’t proven to be a dead end that burned itself out by remixing and recycling, and instead has begun to influence design across the rest of gaming, with developers able to see what works and to build on it. It’s sort of fascinating to think that the survival genre didn’t exist in any identifiable form a decade ago, and here it is, now, making the old, old template of the competitive FPS richer than it has any right to be.