With online multiplayer first-person extraction shooters seemingly now ten-a-penny, it can perhaps be all too easy to forget that the genre arguably hit its peak with 2020’s Hunt: Showdown, a fantastic genre entry which combined traditional survival horror beats with superb level design, cutting edge sound engineering and the sort of risk/reward systems that made every game feel utterly unique.
Now more than four years later, Hunt: Showdown 1896 takes over from where Hunt: Showdown left off, unceremoniously jettisoning the PS4 version in favour of a vast swathe of technical improvements that simply wouldn’t have been feasible on Sony’s last generation console.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 PS5 Review
An Innovative Extraction Shooter That Still Remains Without Equal
First it’s worth mentioning that Hunt: Showdown 1896 plays almost identically to the now defunct Hunt: Showdown and so for the uninitiated then, allow me to set the scene for what I feel is the best extraction shooter ever (the rest of you folks can feel free to skip forward to the improvements that Hunt: Showdown 1896 brings to the table over its last gen predecessor). Rather than throwing the player into some trite, shopworn sci-fi setting or a dull-hued, cargo container filled near-future locale, Hunt: Showdown 1896 instead unfurls its violent tapestries across 1896 Louisiana and the lands beyond. Here, the romanticism of the Bayou is tempered instead by rot, decay and corruption as congealed swampland spreads as far as the eye can see, with various abandoned farmhouses and compounds pockmarking that grim, patchwork visage as untold grotesqueries roam freely in search of murderous opportunities. It’s an evocative setting and one that serves as Hunt: Showdown 1896’s greatest strengths.
The core of the Hunt: Showdown 1896 experience is the Bounty Hunt mode that has been a staple of its design since the game first debuted on PS4 back in February 2020. Once you’ve picked out your hunter, perks and loadout (more on this in a bit) from the main menu and begin a bounty hunt game the goal is fairly simple – you must use your dark sight to identify up to three clues in different locations dotted around the map. Once all three clues have been collected the location of the boss – essentially the bounty contract for that particular hunt – is revealed, before you then go off, attempt to kill the bloody thing and then extract from the token which drops from its fallen form.
Where Hunt: Showdown 1896 gets especially spicy however, is in how it seemingly marshals the forces of the world to prevent you from completing your hunt. You see, if you happen to be lucky enough to be part of a group to take down one of Hunt: Showdown 1896’s devastating bosses, you must then spend nearly two minutes performing a summon ritual to create the bounty token from where the boss was slain. The thing is, this very act absolutely lights you up like a hand grenade going off in a fireworks factory and so every hunter will know exactly where you are and will, in most cases, come running to your position.
However, nothing is quite so satisfying as the not-so-humble bear trap which can very often turn Hunt: Showdown 1896 into a surprisingly effective house invasion romp if you happen to be in a compound where you’re trying to summon the bounty token from a boss enemy. Place one of those bad boys on the other side of a closed door, or in front of a window or some other point of ingress and just wait for that delicious sound of a hunter sneaking around and then – KRONCH – their leg is turned into mush, they cannot move and their position is immediately highlighted to you, leaving them ripe for the blasting/stabbing.
Not only do you have to worry about the other teams of two or three that are seeking the same objective, but so too must you also contend with a world in which just about every inch of it wants you dead. From hordes of weapon toting zombies, to rotting corpses which have been taken over by a hive of poisonous insects, rabid dogs, tentacled horrors that lurk in the swamp waters and towering armoured monstrosities to name just a few, Hunt: Showdown 1896 doesn’t need other players to kill you, it can do a pretty good job of that on its own and it frequently does.
Naturally, with such a weighty emphasis on the ‘E’ part of its overarching PvPvE design, Hunt: Showdown 1896 provides players with an omnipresent threat and keen players can leverage this smartly, by baiting foes into areas where high volume of monsters exist and letting nature (well, a defilement of nature) take its course. More often than that not though, especially early on, it’s all too easy to panic or run from your human enemies into a whole bunch of swamp-dwelling fiends and end up getting stabbed/immolated/poisoned/crushed in short order. Thus, to say that your head has to be swivel at all times in Hunt: Showdown 1896 would be the understatement of the year. In case you haven’t realised it yet, Hunt: Showdown 1896 is a tremendous synergy of first-person shooter, extraction shooter, stealth and survival horror the likes of which we haven’t seen before and this is just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
There’s also a surprising amount of innovation and violent ingenuity that is threaded through every aspect of Hunt: Showdown 1896’s design DNA. In addition to an impressive range of pistols, shotguns, rifles, sabres and more that you can equip prior to starting a hunt, there are all manner of traps and makeshift weapons dotted around every map that you can collect and use to murder your enemies with too. From sledge hammers and axes, to oil lanterns that when thrown or shot at range become improv Molotov cocktails, there’s generally something to get you out of a pinch in the close or immediate vicinity. The thing is, you might also find yourself using these weapons a fair bit out of necessity early on, not least because Hunt: Showdown 1896 supplies the player with era appropriate firearms which are not automatic and most of which require reloading after every shot. So it certainly behooves you to make sure you have enough left in chamber because reloading in the middle of a firefight just isn’t going to get it done.
Ultimately though, death comes very quickly and very easily in Hunt: Showdown 1896. Combat between players is generally over as quickly as it begins thanks to just about every shot causing instant death, while the surrounding threats and other hostile elements in each map are so prolific that these things can also send your character to the digital afterlife extremely quickly indeed. Hunt: Showdown 1896 absolutely demands to be respected by those who would treat it as the nail-biting survival horror effort it is – rather than just some regular, run ‘n’ gun extraction shooter which will see your avatar put six feet under in short order. In short, fans of Call of Duty need not apply unless they fancy the challenge of changing their stripes – a challenge I would very much encourage them to take up.
Elsewhere, the 3D sound design is such a key element of Hunt: Showdown 1896’s utterly immersive and violent theatre, that wearing a pair of headphones isn’t just a good idea, it’s downright essential. In 2024, Hunt: Showdown 1896 draws a much more recent analogue in the big screen’s A Quiet Place, where traps, monsters and other players aren’t so much your primary foe as sound is. Every rattle of pots and pans that have been accidentally disturbed, every murder of crows that is sent shrieking into the sky at your mere presence, every crunch of broken glass on the ground, every cracking branch under foot, every errant gunshot and so much more absolutely lights up your position like an aural Christmas tree and impresses upon you the need to tread absolutely as quietly as possible.
This stellar implementation of 3D sound also plays directly into the notion that every time you play a session of Hunt: Showdown 1896, it feels like an entirely unique survival horror experience that feels precisely calibrated based on the emergent player stories that reliably arise from every game. In one example, a trio of us were performing uncommonly well – we had killed two of the three opposing hunters, found all the clues and were now well on our way to taking down our bounty contract. However, that player sniped one of our group, instantly killing them and forcing us to rush into a nearby sawmill to regroup. Little did we know that not only was the closest entry door booby trapped, clamping my teammates leg into place, but neither did we quite appreciate a massive, towering foe with a massive meat cleaver and large leeches that would routinely fall from its body and attack us. Fun times certainly! Though this is just one example of the limitless emergent player storytelling driven scenarios that Hunt: Showdown 1896 enables and encourages players to create.
Though Hunt: Showdown 1896 is not a single player game in the strictest sense (there are no real offline modes), you can still play solo online if you wish. Indeed, while you can just play a Bounty Hunt, never kill a boss, but just spend your time killing the smaller enemies, collect experience and still meaningfully progress, you should also be aware that you will be a single individual against teams or two or three and so your odds of defeating a boss, let alone facing down an enemy player team and winning become vanishingly slim. Of course, should you succeed then the level of satisfaction is that much more pronounced to say the least.
Neatly, this also taps into what is a significant part of Hunt: Showdown 1896’s charm – the risk and reward dynamic that defines every game you’ll ever play. Every hunter that you take with you will lose their individual progress milestones and gear when they are killed and so it becomes clear that you’re constantly having to make risk and reward calculations on the fly in just about every situation. Do you hang back at a distance and wait for a lone hunter to begin summoning a bounty token and then go in at the last minute – hoping to kill them and steal the token – while also potentially risking permadeath in the process? It’s entirely up to you and the constant tautness of Hunt: Showdown 1896’s moment to moment gameplay loop makes the entire process intoxicating.
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Speaking of progression, there’s a veritable iceberg of progression layers and systems in place in regards to Hunt: Showdown 1896 which always gives you something to aim for. Starting with in-game currencies, Hunt Dollars can be earned by completing bounties, extracting successfully, killing opposing hunters or just scrounged from the local environment, may also be used to purchase new gear and weapons for your hunters, in addition to purchasing all-new hunters in their entirety to add to your roster. Next, Blood Bonds, which can only be purchased with real-life cash from the in-game store or the PlayStation Store can be used to not just purchase cosmetics for your hunters and their weapons, but special battle passes which in turn unlock event exclusive progression.
To be clear, though the higher end rewards from these events can only generally be grabbed with Blood Bonds, these rewards are always cosmetic updates and upgrades, rather than anything especially game changing. To be clear, Hunt: Showdown 1896 is not a pay-to-win affair and certainly no matter how swanky somebody’s threads are, a well-placed headshot will put them down as surely as it would if they were cutting about the place in prison rags. That said, the events are often worth getting involved with because not only do they have their own free progression track (albeit with less flashy rewards than its premium equivalent), but they also have their own self-contained stories too which often shed some neat insight on the lore of the various maps and denizens that lurk therein.
Beyond currencies, Hunt: Showdown 1896’s progression systems are split between hunter and weapon progression paths. Hunter progression is actually divided into two portions, with hunter level increasing as you complete objectives, kill enemies and extract and provide additional slots for perks (essentially buffs) the further you go. However, hunter levels are tied to each hunter and so when that hunter dies, all of that levelling dies with them.
The other side of the hunter progression coin is the bloodline level system. Functioning as a sort of macro progression mechanic that persists across your entire account and through the death of individual hunters, bloodline experience is gained in the same way as hunter experience, but as you gain levels in the bloodline, you gain access to new weapons and hunters that wouldn’t have been accessible before. And then we have weapon progression where the more you use a particular brand or class of weapons, the more experience you gain in that weapon the more additional weapons you unlock and so on and so forth. Put simply, all of these progression pathways provide players with ample opportunity to plough hundreds of hours into the game and more importantly, making it exciting and compelling to do so. Progression should never feel like a chore – it should just happen as the background noise to the gameplay loop you’re experiencing and Hunt: Showdown 1896 absolutely nails this with aplomb.
It’s also worth noting that beyond the marquee attraction of its bounty hunt mode, Hunt: Showdown 1896 also provides other modes for wannabe hunters to sharpen their respective knives on too. A last man standing style mode provides and enables solo play with players being provided with a free hunter for killing each other until one remains to claim special wellspring, while for absolute beginners, a highly in-depth and enjoy tutorial mode teaches you the ropes and a shooting range provides a decent amount of time to get to grips with the ever-growing arsenal of Hunt: Showdown 1896.
Hunt: Showdown Finally Gets The Technical Overhaul It Has Long Deserved
Of course, the real reason why we’re applying the ‘1896′ suffix to Hunt: Showdown is because developer Crytek has thoroughly revamped the game for PS5, bringing with it a wealth of technical improvements that just wasn’t possible on Sony’s last generation PlayStation console. Though the 60 frames per second patch for the PS4 version was welcome when it dropped a couple of years back, it was just that – a bump to the framerate and nothing else, so you still had to make do with the poor resolution, texture detail and muddy draw distances that were part and parcel of the PS4’s technical limitations.
What Hunt: Showdown 1896 does however, is entirely overhaul the visual presentation side of things, thanks to a boost to 4K resolution (maintaining the 60 frames per second framerate into the bargain), along with a shift to the latest version of the CryEngine which brings with it greatly improved lighting, shadows, texture detail and levels of detail at long distances – allowing you to actually see what’s off in the distance through sniper scope, rather than having it all turn into a some detail-bereft mush. Better realised than ever before, there is a substantial level of granular detail to the world of Hunt: Showdown 1896 too. The destroyed beauty of formerly grand statehouses, with their set out tables, vast pantries, libraries, smoking rooms and more all stand out on PS5 and help to make Hunt: Showdown 1896 one of the best looking extraction shooters on the market today.
Away from the in-game visuals, Hunt: Showdown 1896 has also made substantial improvements to the UI too (a quick glance at the current Steam reviews for Hunt: Showdown 1896 however suggest that it’s not a particularly well shared sentiment with PC players, but hey ho). By removing the clumsy PC cursor which wasn’t really suitable in the first place for a console title and reorganising the menus much more clearly, it’s now a much more welcoming experience overall even though the sheer number of menus, thanks in no small part to the multiple currencies, various battle passes and so on, make navigation still a little more of a hassle than it should have been to begin with.
Finally, Hunt: Showdown 1896 also brings one more goody bag to the table – an entirely new map called Mammon’s Gulch. A huge map and the first to be located outside of Hunt: Showdown’s usual Louisiana stomping grounds, the Colorado set Mammon’s Gulch is a sprawling blend of towering mountains, interconnected deep mines, scorched forests and ashen settlements and not only does it provide Hunt: Showdown 1896 with a very different looking map to the previous three locales, but so too does it put a real focus on verticality, allowing keen-eyed players to take the high ground and gain a degree of surveillance over much of the map. Simply fantastic stuff and make no mistake.
A nail-biting triumph that is without equal in the extraction shooter genre, Hunt: Showdown 1896’s eye-opening overhaul couldn’t come at a better time. With unmatched atmospherics, a thoroughly detailed world rife with grotesqueness to immerse yourself in and some of the most keenly honed risk and reward mechanics ever seen in the genre, Hunt: Showdown 1896 is arguably now more essential than it ever was.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 is out now on PS5 with a free upgrade for those who purchased Hunt: Showdown on PS4.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 was purchased independently by the reviewer.