If like us, one of your most hotly anticipated games of 2018 is Crytek's Hunt: Showdown, then you'll be excited to learn that the first official Alpha test -- an expanded take on the stress tests previously conducted - will open for approved testers on January 31.
Hunt: Showdown is a make or break title for Crytek. After years of financial difficulties, it secured some respite with Amazon leasing its CryEngine to build its Lumberyard engine on top of it. However, Crytek needs its next game to be a big hit. Hunt: Showdown has been in the works for many years -- originally titled Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age -- and has been retooled several times, but the early footage we saw of it last year, had us at Megagames very excited and we're far from the only ones.
Hunt: Showdown takes elements of Left 4 Dead, Evolve and sandbox survival games, to craft an experience where players are split into coop teams of two and tasked with hunting down a demonic threat on a map filled with zombies, undead dogs, demon creatures, Cthulhu spawns and all sorts of nasties. The clincher is that they're competing with one another, so teams can take each other out too.
That means you can go for the objective yourself, doing all the hard work and running out, or simply wait for the other team in an ambush spot and steal the glory.
Equipment will carry over between characters, but stat upgrades and cosmetic changes will die with your character, so progression is slow and steady and there's always a chance of losing what you worked for. Death in Hunt: Showdown is a big deal.
It won't be such a big deal during the closed alpha in a few weeks, as everything will reset for the main release anyway, but it's going to give us our first taste of what it's actually like hunting in tense groups in the undead bayou.
If you haven't already, you can sign up for the closed alpha on the main site.
