Showdown Shows That Less Is More In Stealth Games

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Hunt: Showdown is an intensely atmospheric online shooter, set in a rendition of the muggy swamps and rural hinterlands of 19th century Louisiana that’s been beset by some preternatural plague turning the local populace into all manner of unholy monsters. Despite dabbling in the paranormal and in that sense not being ‘realistic,’ the game is remarkably free of superfluous systems and UI elements; there are no visibility indicators when AI monsters spot you, no automated semi-invisibility when you crouch down in a bush, no ‘Spotted’ tags that stick to you, not even a notification saying when you’ve successfully killed someone.

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It’s precisely this stripped-back design that makes Hunt: Showdown one of the best stealth games around.

The goal of the game is to scour the map in teams of two or three (or solo, if you’re feeling ballsy), searching for clues to locate the map boss located at one of the compounds. You then go fight the boss, collect its bounty, and extract from the map. The game is, however, complicated by the fact that you’re playing against several other teams with the same goal, so you may get ambushed while fighting a boss, for example, or even turn up at a compound to find three dead teams and a dead boss, letting you pick up the bounty and leave without a fight–Reservoir Dogs style.

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You don’t have to play Hunt: Showdown stealthily, but for people like me who rely on cunning over quick reflexes, it’s the most tactically sound and rewarding approach. With little in the way of UI indicators or fancy mechanics to help you spot players (or even know how many are on a given map or team), you need to rely on your sense of sound more here than in any other game I’ve played.

Disrupted chicken coops, flocks of crows or ducks, triggered monsters, or even the sound of someone leaping over a fence will give you a sense of where your enemies are, and vice versa. After collecting a clue, you can look at the map to see which parts have been greyed out, which gives you a broad idea of where other teams have collected clues. These things, along with distant gunshots, crows taking flight (always away from the direction the disturbance came from), and myriad other cues steadily give you a sense of where enemies are, and how many of them there are.

It gives you the opportunity to play like a stalker. It’s always better to trail other teams than be trailed, and by following the myriad sound cues you can move through the dense foliage, toppled trees, cornfields and dilapidated farms and villages behind your enemies. When they slow down for a moment–or better still engage in a firefight against another team–then you strike. Of course, the devil (which may well be an actual entity in this game, for all we know) makes work for idle hands, and an erroneous step that forces you to engage with a pack of hellhounds, or even a little mini-sprint to catch up with your enemies can give away your general location, reverse the stalker/stalked dynamic in an instant.

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There are all kinds of dirty tricks you can pull to give your enemies the impression that you don’t exist, which is precisely what a stealth player wants. Being first into a boss fight, for example, opens the possibility for a fast smash-and-grab extraction, but also that you’ll be surrounded or ambushed by other teams coming in. So you can hide near the entrance and wait for another team to turn up and ambush them. Patience is key here. Fire off as another team’s approaching a compound, and you’re likely to end up in a firefight, but hold tight, hide, then attack them when they run outside to recover some health from the grueling boss encounter, and you really give yourself the upper hand. Not since Alien: Isolation have I felt so completely gripped and present in a game even as I sit in one place for five minutes, simply listening to what’s going on around me.

Headphones are a must for Hunt: Showdown, to really tune in on what’s happening and where. I never thought the volume roller on my keyboard would have such vital tactical use, but I find myself instinctively turning it right up in those moments where I’m not quite sure whether, beneath the game’s deep rural ambience, I’m hearing a zombie shuffling around or an enemy player crouch-walking through the undergrowth. Then, when those shotguns, revolvers and rifles break the silence, I slide the volume back down for the preservation of my eardrums.

As someone who’s always been a great admirer of stripped back stealth games like Thief, where the only stealth indicator is a small gem showing how well lit you are at any given moment, Hunt: Showdown is right up my street, forcing me to rely on my instincts, careful movements, and realistic environmental cues to get the jump on my rival hunters. Make no mistake, once everyone’s position has been revealed and the gunshots start a’ringing, Hunt’s an intense, explosive shooter with low time-to-kill and extremely high stakes, but between these short outbursts of ultraviolence, it shows that less can be more in a great stealth game.

NEXT: Hunt Showdown: Best Loadouts For Beginners

 

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