Hunt: Showdown is brutal, but you'll soon get caught in its web

[Administrator]

"Fast and agile" is how Crytek describes the spider, one of Hunt: Showdown's two currently available boss monsters. "Fast and agile", oh, and "immune to poison". I've spent a few hours in the creature's rough vicinity now, listening to its feet rattle across the ceilings of barns and slaughterhouses, and I worry this is selling it short. "Fast and agile" makes me think of doomed management consultancies and Lucio from Overwatch, whereas the words I'm searching for have no consonants and far too many vowels. They are words lifted direct from the 50 million-odd lines of genetic code human beings share with fruit flies. They are words that always end in exclamation marks.
Once a linear co-op shooter subtitled "Horrors of the Gilded Age", Hunt has mutated following the closure of its original developer Crytek USA into a sweaty, abrasive, sporadically brilliant mixture of DayZ and Evolve. Out now in Early Access, it's a 5-10 player survival game in which you scour a diseased chunk of 19th century Louisiana for an eldritch horror of some kind, gathering clues to track down the creature's randomly situated lair. Once you've found and killed it, you must banish the monster to hell, which involves defending the corpse for a few minutes while it is consumed by ritual energies. Then you'll need to pick up your bounty and head to a stage coach to end the match. Gosh, how straightforward I've just made all that sound. Rest assured that there are twists in the tale.
While following trails of blue light to clues using your character's "darksight", you must deal with lesser foes such as zombie dogs, walking insect hives and giant leeches. Sprinkled across the dense swamps and woodlands with devilish abandon, these aren't so much threats as speedbumps, forcing you to creep along or take circuitous routes while racing to the prize. The beefier varieties pack a nasty wallop, but the real danger of fighting them is drawing the attention of other hunters. The game's balance of PvP and PvE is exceedingly unforgiving: there's currently only one boss per match, and rivals can always ambush you while you're fighting it or relieve you of your winnings on the way to extraction. Having located the lair, the question is always whether to risk an attack or let somebody else soften the beast up before taking over.
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