So I played a lot more of this and I am leaning strongly to thinking that Crytek have something special here. Last night I only meant to dabble in one small session and ended up spending most of the evening playing the game then still thinking about it after I closed it down.
I feel like Hunt took some of the best aspects of DayZ, PUBG, Resident Evil, The Evil Within, and concepts from the Arkham Horror style board games. It’s multiplayer but more intimate and of smaller scale than PUBG. Encounters with other players skew towards the rarer side but are fierce clashes that may end as fast as they start.
The real winner here is the environmental design filled with imaginative grotesque creatures that put some of Resident Evil’s best to shame. Sound design is very important as any noise may attract the hulking beasts that stalk the level or other players. Floor boards creak, chains dangle from rafters everywhere, broken glass crunches underfoot, and rusty hinges on doors groan. Other examples are more imaginative. I was creeping through stables and a field of dead horses. Decaying horse carcasses litter the field and a few zombie like creatures were hunched over the bodies tearing into the flesh. I was creeping through this gruesome scene and one horse that was still alive but whimpering started a wide-eyed panic neighing as I crouch-walked past it. The sound was quite gut wrenching by itself but also alerted all nearby monsters (and players if any were near).
I have stalked players through levels, ambushed some louder careless ones, been ambused myself, and had some interesting gun fights. I have mostly been playing solo so I am at a disadvantage against 2-player teams but I still hold my own and have sprung some effective traps against teams. Most matches I end up dead but that is because I have been playing aggressively…that kicks in the rougeish element where I lost my hunter and carried gear but still gain experience and money for the long-term enterprise. One can play more carefully and avoid PVP encounters, gather a lot of clues, rack up experience tackling the monsters in the level, and extract oneself before the match ends to save your Hunter and gear. You don’t need to complete the primary objective in the match to have a tense enjoyable time and accrue longterm progression.
The gun designs are really something. Lever action rifles that have razor blades on the lever that allow brutal melee attacks or revolvers with improvised silencers or larger than life cylinders. Your character won’t auto reload and manual reload animations are long. It’s nerve wracking to be firing a revolver and then hear the click click click of empty cylinders while a creature is bearing down on your position.
I can’t wait to inhabit more of this imaginative, disgusting, decaying world and learn of the lore and discover more narrative vignettes scattered about the landscape. I like that some recent titles like Hunt Showdown or Escape from Tarkov are taking the DayZ/PUBG model and refining it and pushing it into other genres like survival horror or STALKER.
I’ve only been playing one map during the (in-game) day. I’ve been a little hesitant to try the nighttime versions which will be a whole different experience.
All of that aside this is still Early Early Access. I have had server desyncs, server disconnects, I fell through the level geometry, and my FPS has been low. I have a GTX 970 and an I7 and I have been struggling to maintain above 40 FPS even when turning the settings down to low with AA off…this is a Crytek game on the CryEngine after all. Despite that I have still enjoyed my time here.
