Most of my gaming decisions are made by what is available for free as part of my PS-Plus library subscriptions. I don't really follow gaming news and I am not what you would call and early adopter as far as games are concerned. I just don't spend enough time on gaming to really bother with such things although I don't knock it! It's a fantastic hobby.
Lately, I got excited about a game called Hunt: Showdown because the concept sounded interesting, even though the multiplayer aspect of it was not something I was ever going to participate in. I'm afraid you 12-year olds are just too good at the button pressing for me to do anything other than frustrate the hell out of myself if I get involved.
It is classified as an "extraction shooter" and I had to look up what that means. Apparently it is PVP vs environment as well and I was already kind of turned off by the PVP part of it. I don't want to play vs other players in anything other than RTS games. Even then I would rather we were on the same side. I'm not a competitive gamer and you wouldn't want me on your team no matter how intelligent the lobby ranking system is.
I'm a casual and I am happy to remain that way.
The look should be familiar enough. It looks like any number of other FPS games. In this, you are searching for some sort of exotic and often mythical creature that you need to kill and then once you manage to do so you have to get the eff out of there without getting killed yourself. The real enemy is probably the other human players. Survive long enough to get to an extraction point and you are rewarded. Get eliminated and I guess the entire run was for naught.
I wouldn't really know because I never made it that far.
This game, at least on PS5 is plagued with very tiny instructions and font on screen and my eyes are not the best. If I was at a PC I think it would be ok but I am playing on the other side of the room on a relatively large TV screen. To me, it is completely unacceptable that the font would appear to be about 15 pt on a screen of that size and there are no "accessibility options" to increase the font size in game either. Lame.
So this was never going to work for me because as you might expect, an innovative style of game like this one is going to require you do to a bunch of reading and for me, this consisted of constantly needing to stand up from the sofa to see WTF is on the screen.
But to be fair, even if I had been able to read what was up there I would have gotten frustrated out of playing this game based one what I have read from other players.
The thing is, once you or your team discover and kill the "hunt" your position is now revealed to all other human players on the map who are now hunting YOU. I have read that many of the players in these games don't even so much as pursue finding the hunt, they just wait for someone else to do it and then snipe them. that sounds awful and was not something I wanted to experience.
Searching for clues about the location of a mythical beast does sound like fun but like a lot of other games out there, this game is designed to never end. It is like Helldivers in this regard. In the game's own description the words "gameplay loop" is mentioned many times so to me that was always going to be a no go, even if I could easily read what is on the screen.
This game is free so I am not going to complain too much outside of I don't really like it when any game has tiny font that would be fine if you were sitting two feet from a monitor, but it doesn't work out so well for someone in their 40's with a normal amount of vision loss that is sitting on the other side of the room.
Plus, combine these frustrations with the fact that the game intentionally has very scarce ammunition and we have the worst parts of Resident Evil mixed in there as well.
This one was an easy pass for me. If you are a competitive gamer or even worse, someone who enjoys grief-killing suckers who are just trying to play the game, this might be fun for a little while.
These games come up for free for a reason, in the case of Hunt I think it is because this game has already run its course and nobody is actually going to pay money for it anymore.