Hunt: Showdown is Crytek's big title of 2018 and it needs to do well. The company is in a difficult financial situation, so it's putting a lot of eggs in the demon-hunting basket, but is it any good? Early alpha testing suggests it's pretty great, but performance issues may plague its ongoing development through alpha and beta before a general release later this year.
PCGamer took the latest alpha build for a spin and had a lot of fun with it. The reporters said that the game ditches looting mechanics of other survival games like PuBG, making so that you don't spend your whole time opening cupboards and doors and that sound is just as much a part of the game as anything else. Along with listening to the local VOIP chat you have with your singular teammate, you also have to listen out to the environment. Basic enemies splash around in the water, or moan in the distance. Dogs or gunshots can alert other teams to your location.
If you're sprinting through the undergrowth, your hearing is muted, making speed and stealth a real tradeoff for one another.
Weapons feel sufficiently weighty and the process of aiming down on them, targeting an enemy and firing are all a little overly complicated -- but in a good way. It makes it so that nobody is 360 quick-scoping in Hunt. You need to take your time with shooting and it means that gunfights with other players are particularly tense, even if the age-old circle strafing in front of each other is as common as ever.
The big problem with the game as it exists though, is optimization. Reporters suggested that even with a decent CPU, plenty of RAM and a 980Ti graphics card, frame rates could drop to five per second, and occasional freezes stoppered gameplay altogether.
Hunt: Showdown then is an existing game, but it still needs a lot of work.
