E3 is over and done with and the big stuff like Call of Duty WWII, Star War Battlefront 2, and Super Mario Odyssey have all been covered to death. Now is the time when other games that were at the show get a little time to shine, now that the dust has settled. One such game is Hunt: Showdown, by Crytek.
Hunt has a bit of a storied past, as the game was originally being developed here in the States, in Austin, Texas, but when CryTek shut down that studio, they moved the game and its development to Frankfurt, the company's main office. A lot has happened since 2014, when the game was first shown off, take for example the game was originally a 3rd-person shooter and was very much a horde mode-based game. Fast-forward three years and the game is something new entirely.
Hunt is now a first-person shooter, a genre that CryTek knows very well, but it's also something new and refreshing, a completely new take on multiplayer shooters. Imagine an open map (not world), that has you and a group (possibly friends) in the swamps of Louisana in the back half of the 1800's. It's dark, creepy and there are zombie-like monsters, massive spiders, and demons from hell, but there are also "other" groups of players, all seeking to do the same thing as you, banish these demons to hell for a reward. It has a lot of great mechanics built in, like proximity voice chat. Meaning, if you get too far from your teammates, they can no longer hear you, but a close player, who may be an enemy, will. Every step you take makes a noise, every bullet you fire will draw attention from everything around you, stepping on and breaking a twig, could cost you your life. If you manage to succeed in your task and banish a demon back to hell, your success will show up on the map, letting every other team and player know what you did and where you did it. In the end, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Currently, it looks like Hunt: Showdown will only be available for PC, but hopefully, like FarCry and Crysis, the game will be ported to consoles, especially with hardware like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
