Hunt: Showdown 1896 - Taker of Trophies

The store page sells a slow, tense bounty hunt where sound matters more than aim, and that part is honest. What it leaves out is that your first twenty hours will feel like getting bullied by people you never see, and that the menus wrapping this thing are the least pleasant part of owning it. I have watched friends bounce off it in a single evening and watched others reorganize their week around it. Crytek built something genuinely unusual here, a competitive shooter that rewards patience, listening, and outright cowardice, and then kept renovating the house around it in ways that keep splitting the player base. A match drops up to twelve hunters into one map in trios, though duos and solos queue into the same lobbies, so being outnumbered is a normal Tuesday. You track a target by burning clues in Dark Sight, corner whatever thing is holding the bounty (a hulking Butcher, a wall-climbing Spider, an Assassin made of insects), banish it, then try to walk out alive carrying a token that lights you up for everyone still breathing. That last part is the entire design. The moment you win the monster fight, you become the objective. Compounds are dense and vertical, built around windows you never noticed until someone shot you through one, and the ten minutes after a banish are some of the best sustained tension in any multiplayer shooter. The gunplay is deliberately awkward in a way I have come to love. Period rifles with slow bolt cycles, single-action revolvers, shotguns fed one shell at a time. Bullet drop is real, most guns kill in one or two hits to the chest, and reloading in the open is a decision rather than a reflex. Audio is the actual skill ceiling. Crows burst out of trees when you sprint past, hanging chains rattle, dogs bark, glass crunches underfoot, and a competent squad triangulates you from three rooms away on that alone. Headphones are not a suggestion. Permadeath then closes the loop: lose a hunter and you lose that hunter, their perks, and everything you equipped them with. It makes a top-tier rifle feel like an investment and turns every third-party gunfight into a real question about whether the fight is worth what it costs. Where it disappoints is mostly everything outside the bayou. The 1896 relaunch brought an engine upgrade and a rebuilt interface, and that interface has been a running sore point since. Managing loadouts, contracts, and event pages takes more clicks than it should, and the storefront is never far from your thumb. Progression is bolted to seasonal events and passes, cosmetics are pushed hard, and all of that sits awkwardly against a game that otherwise treats your time with respect. Post-upgrade performance has been uneven depending on hardware. Matchmaking can seat a fresh player near someone with several thousand hours, and while the skill-based system tries, the spread on a quiet night is wide. Cheating complaints surface in waves. Events rotate aggressively enough that taking three months off means returning to a different meta and a different pass. A lifetime rating of mostly positive across more than a quarter of a million reviews reads exactly right: people love this game and argue constantly with the people running it. Play it if you like losing. Not metaphorically. Dying with nothing to show for it is the normal outcome here, and the fun lives in how the loss happened, which sound you misread, which door you should not have opened, which reload you started one second too early. If you want steady dopamine, fast respawns, and loadouts that survive your mistakes, go elsewhere and you will not be wrong to. If you want a shooter where one creaking floorboard rearranges your heart rate and a clean extraction feels like getting away with something, very little else does this. Bring headphones, bring patience for the menus, and bring two friends who can stay quiet.

Alex · Scout Team

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