Recent reviews by Dr. Meowdy

First things first, I am horrendously biased towards this game. I think it’s one of the best titles to come out, full stop. It’s fantastic for what it is, and the developers are committed, passionate, and listen to the community as much as they can.

Disclaimer aside – Hunt: Showdown is a great survival, horror game. I’m reticent to call it a battle royale, but I’ll have to for the sake of comparison. You, your partner, and four other teams of two spawn into a map 1km by 1km, populated by several compounds, lots of monsters, and one or two bosses. Your job is to enter a compound, interact with the clue, then head to another compound and do the same, then do it one more time. This reveals the location of the boss monster, although you can stumble onto it accidentally without finding any clues. You kill the monster, wait 100 seconds for it to banish, and then extract with your bounty, lives in hand. The issue is that the other teams are going for the same objective, and there are only two bounties, leading to intense fights, some uneasy alliances, and tense moments where you’re stalking around a building. You know they know you’re here, but do they know that you know that they know? Great fun.

It’s set in the late 19th century, or thereabouts. Your weapons are revolvers, lever-action rifles, bolt actions, and shotguns. Occasionally you’ll come across something more fantastic, such as the bomblance, an explosive harpoon firing device which comes with a large blade affixed to the end, perfect for running into a room and slicing up enemy hunters. The path to your bounty is fraught with peril, both from players and various types of zombies. The zombies range from the hive, an undead, walking bee-hive which will send out swarms of insects to irritate you, to the meat-head, a giant, lumbering thing which targets you based on how much noise you make.

Speaking of noise, it’s a crucial element in this game. The first time you play, you’ll question if you’re in an empty lobby. You’ll hear no gunshots, no explosions, even though you saw the option to pack dynamite bundles the size of a man’s head. No, this game is essentially silent, up until the point where it isn’t. When you’re forced to shoot the grunt which threatens to lower your health bar, you worriedly look around, wondering if the shot lured over any bloodthirsty players looking for a kill or two.

It’s a game which requires patience, skill, and rewards a variety of tactics. You can charge into the building guns blazing, you can throw enough explosives in there to make their ears ring (an actual thing now), or you can sit on the hill over yonder, waiting for someone to step out the door. Every strategy has its own value, and that’s what I love about this game. The models for the equipment you’ll be using are also fantastic, with legendary skins allowing you to add a bit more flair to your hunter.

The thing that might put some people off is the fact that the game is in hardmode. You start with 5000 dollars, more than enough to kit out hunters for many levels to come. When you finish a mission and extract, you’ll be rewarded with money. IF you die, you get no money, half the XP you would have earned, and you lost everything your hunter was carrying. Hunters also level up individually to your overall level – the latter gives you access to more equipment; the former allows you to kit out your characters with perks. As such, which hunter you bring into the game has a real consequence: you earn more XP with higher level hunters, but you do want to risk a potential death for him?

The game is tense, suspenseful, and can be scary at times. If you only play one game this year, then this has to be it, although I question why you have a PC if you’re only playing one game this year.

Subnautica is a survival game, something which will be an immediate turn off for a lot of people, I know. ‘Survival game’ is a phrase which developers seem to want associated with their game because of the rise of titles like Minecraft (proper survival), Terraria (not really survival, more conquest), and Ark: Survival Evolved (an absolute mess of a game and three-thousand hours of both my console and PC life I’m never getting back). However, cast these doubts aside, for Subnautica is survival done right, not that Minecraft did much wrong.

You have been stranded on planet 4546B, and all you can see when you exit your survival pod is water, water, more water, and your crashed ship in the distance. You exit the pod and are given some prompts which teach you controls and basic tenants of the game, before you’re set free on the unsuspecting wildlife. After you’ve scouted around for ten minutes and figured out that you can cook fish (which is the most violent thing you can do by the way, guns aren’t a thing here), you’re helmets AI will tell you of the imminent explosion of the ship. There isn’t much you can do here, except sit on your pod and watch a really nice explosion sequence. This, or more accurately your need to go and repair the nuclear drive of the ship, is what triggers the story. As far as survival games go, the story is really good. It doesn’t hold your hand, but instead gives you a gentle push in the right direction, compelling you to explore every inch of the map to discover new technologies and blueprints, while simultaneously finding out about the shady history of your employer (it’s not a spoiler, all mega-corporations are shady).

Story aside, the world is fantastic. It feels alive, with creatures swimming, floating, and even walking around the ocean, some of which you can eat, some of which eat you, and some of which are just there to look at. The shallows are bright and colourful, while the depths are dark and dreary, danger lurking around every tight bend: that flicker of light in the distance might be an abandoned base with the last fragment of the submarine you need, or it might be the ghost leviathan you read about in a file you discovered. The map is also custom made, lending to this feeling of it being real – there are no awkwardly placed rocks which clip into trees, or dodgy looking landscapes, and even the boundaries of the map are well though out. Every player does it at some point, and I recommend you do the same: you hop into your seamoth, a small and nimble submarine, and head out past the rim of the giant volcano crater which supports the ecosystem you’ve invaded. I won’t spoil it, only to say that you can just swim out into the ocean. Kind of.

If you’re into survival, I’d say you have to pick this up, although I can’t think of a survival enthusiast who hasn’t already tried it. If you’re adverse to the idea of managing food and water bars, then fear not, for you can play with them turned off, and instead just worry about your ship getting eaten by that giant thing in the distance. Subnautica offers a world which is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful, where you can find a herd (flock? Shoal? School?) of walking tripods which traverse the world beneath you, as well as second guess your decision to enter that cave, the moaning roar which came from within surely signalling some monstrous thing which awaits your arrival.

I’ve been playing DBD for about 4 years now, on and off. It’s one of those games which I really like and has some fun gameplay, but there are issues which you’re going to have to ignore if you want to really get into it. To be fair to the developers, there’s not much they can do about the worst of these issues, but more on that later.
The ‘story’ of the game is simple. There’s an interplanar thing called The Entity which feeds off hope which drags beings into its world (known as The Fog) in order to harvest their hope. Survivors are offered hope in the form of being able to escape, yet every time they manage to outrun the killer, they end up at the same campfire, before being forced into the next trial. You can play either survivor or killer, the hunted or the hunter. As a survivor, your objective is to work with the other three people on your team to complete generators and then power the exit gates, which allows you to escape the trial. As a killer, you want to kill all the survivors. You get points for actions you perform in the trial, typically somewhere between 10-20k, and this score translates directly into bloodpoints, the de-facto currency of the game. You can use these points to upgrade your survivors and killers by buying different perks (which last forever), offerings (which last one match), and items (which last until you lose them, usually by dying).
First off, the game is really grindy. Really. Grindy. Each character comes with perks, usually focused on a theme. Take Claudette, who is meant to be a healer, but usually just sits in bushes: you a perk which allows you to heal yourself instead of relying on teammates, a perk which makes your healing faster, and another which allows you to see injured teammates. When you hit level 40, you unlock these perks for other survivors. In order to hit level 40 it’s going to take a little over million bloodpoints, probably a million and a quarter. Considering that you get about 20k bloodpoints per game… yeah. It takes a while. You get point modifiers which modify points in a specific category, or points in general, but it takes a while. The way the level up mechanic works, while interesting, can also make this number a bit bigger. Way back when, the double point modifier was relatively easy to obtain, but they increased the rarity of it to make it harder to get, so you can’t rely on them as much anymore.
Second off, the game is a bit of a mouse-click simulator. This is easily the biggest flaw of the game, and one which desperately needs a look at. Let’s compare killer and survivor: as a killer, you run around the map, see a survivor, hit them twice, and then they go down. Once they’re down, you can hook them on randomly spawned hooks around the map, and then they die if they’re hooked for too long or too many times. Assuming that you like it, it’s fun, engaging, and there’s a variety of powers and abilities which modify how this works, although some killers are notably worse than others (Clown). Now survivors. When playing a survivor, your main objective is generators. To complete a generator, you sit next to it, hold the mouse button for 80 seconds, and hit spacebar every now and then. For 80 seconds. This is not fun. This is not engaging. There is no variety of powers and abilities which modify how this works. The fun from playing survivor stems from the killer being around, when you’re forced to hide behind corners, or have to run away from them by vaulting over windows and throwing pallets down on them. It is not fun to repair generators. A lot of ideas have been suggested, and it wouldn’t take an amazing one to improve the experience.
There’s also the issue of balancing. Not between killers and survivors per-se (although some killers and survivors and notably better than others), but between perks. There are about 100 perks for each side, and yet it feels that there’s only 20 which I see in most games. I feel like the developers should hold off on content for a cycle and instead just do a pass on the perks and mechanics within the game.
And the last issue, and definitely the most egregious one, is toxicity. This game is incredibly toxic, and it’s not even something confined to the upper brackets of play. The amount of negative comments I’ve got on my profile from this game alone is pretty whack, and the things which people feel are worthy of a comment are equally bizarre. If you use a certain killer, you’ll be deemed trash, stupid, and should uninstall. If you use a certain perk then you’ll be deemed trash, stupid, and should uninstall. If you don’t prioritise saving that one guy on your team who has more X’s in his name then other letters, you’ll be deemed trash, stupid, and should uninstall. I’ve had people get onto me in the post-game chat for doing something they didn’t like, even though we all escaped and were fine. A lot of the toxicity usually comes from the survivors, who’ll play in a toxic manner, yet hate it when any of this toxicity is reflected on them. I had a game where a survivor was T-bagging me the whole game, and he decided to go for one last T-bag at the exit of the map. I downed him and killed him because you shouldn’t T-bag if you can’t actually play the game, and then I got an essay about how I should have let him go because he ‘earned’ it, and that I was a bad killer anyway, and I’m (you guessed it) trash, stupid, and should uninstall.
All that being said, the game is fun. Provided you can put up with the toxicity then I recommend it, although you might want to bring a friend along as well: nothing is funnier than when you hear your mate scream down his microphone as some pig-headed thing sprints out a bush as him. I realise I’ve just listed the games flaws for 1000 words, but the core loop of the game is pretty good and leads to some suspenseful moments, although I’d be reticent to call them horror.