Hunt Showdown's 1896 relaunch is live and facing player derision over the new UI, bugs and performance

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

The 1896 overhaul moves the game to CryEngine 5.11. When I spoke to Crytek's general manager David Fifield last November about Hunt's unholy evolution since its early access launch in February 2018, he said that the game has been needing a techno-revamp for a while, with new effects such as rain putting the older incarnation of the game (especially, the PS4 and Xbox One versions) under pressure. "It got to like, if we're going to keep doing stuff like this, we have to raise our min spec, and we need to go to the new engine," Fifield told me.

Here's how Crytek say the jump to a new flavour of CryEngine improves the game, courtesy of our dear friend Monsieur Press Release and his trusted associate, Senorita Blockquote:

- A leap in visual fidelity, including improvements across textures, lighting, environments, animations, and more.

- Hunt has been upgraded to DirectX 12, which means better graphical performance and higher FPS.

- A new light cache system and specular tracing for multi-bounce Global Illumination mean higher quality lighting and more depth to environmental visuals, as well as richer darkness.

- Water and hair shaders bring the world of Hunt even further to life with more realistic hair on characters and water and rivers that have never looked better with improved foam, flow, and turbulence for increased realism.

- Adding DLSS and FSR gives the game a performance boost with higher frame rates and sharper graphics.

- Improved CrySpatial audio and audio slapback ecosystem provide improved clarity and sound definition, immersing you even further into the game.

The above "drastic leap" in visual and audio fidelity and performance accompanies a new biome, a new Scorched Earth live event, new types of non-boss munster to slay, a new Wild Target or roaming boss, additional vicious period firearms and melee implements, and new varieties of Hunter. The new map is Mammon's Gulch - a relatively radiant and crisply defined alpine playground, next to the flyblown swamplands of pre-1896 Showdown - and the new Wild Target is the Hellborn, who hikes about the forests coughing fire at people. I still think the Spider is the worst of the roster. Pray god they never let it come looking for you outdoors.

There's also a new user interface, which is designed to be more intuitive and less complicated for new players to pick up. The interface comes up a lot in some of the negative Steam reviews I've read this morning. Hunt Showdown's 1896 rebirth has seen its Steam reviewer consensus plunge from solidly positive to "Mostly Negative" overnight. Delving into the stats, it looks like the largest number of negative reviews the game has received per month since 2018.

The complaints cover a range - rants about bugs, upset over nuances such as bullet drop, objections to the presentation of store adverts when you start the game. Some of the negative reviews are from people with hundreds or thousands of hours of Hunt Showdown playtime, which you could look at in a couple of ways: firstly, these players are expert sources of feedback, and secondly, these players are overinvested - they've been playing for so long they possibly can't see the wood for the trees.

It's worth reiterating that the point of the refresh was partly to bring in new people, not just mollify the old guard. Still, I can't help thinking of Fifield's comments to me last year about Crytek never "replacing" Hunt Showdown with a sequel, as Blizzard has Overwatch 1 with Overwatch 2. As far as I know, there's no option but to play the new version of the game. Offering the ability to reverse key aspects of the 1896 build might soothe the naysayers, though this would presumably be extremely difficult to implement.

Crytek developers are firefighting in the review comments. "Our design team has been hard at work on the long-requested UI overhaul, which is a crucial improvement that's been needed for some time," reads one reply. "We're focused on balancing simplicity with functionality, which was the whole idea behind the new design. We will keep gathering player feedback and refine the UI going forward as well."

The game will be free across 15th-19th August, if you want to give the ole' spider-wrangler a spin and make up your own mind. In other news, I continue to hold out hope for a Hunt singleplayer campaign - Fifield has suggested it's possible, albeit not very likely.