When you’ve been playing something for so long, any big change is going to be disconcerting at first. Hunt Showdown 1896 is a transformative update to the now five-year-old Crytek FPS, adding a new map, overhauled visuals, and dozens of large and small quality-of-life changes. It’s precisely the soft relaunch that Hunt could use – but right now, just one day after it was first released, 1896 is drawing an enormous amount of criticism from Steam players. The concurrent user count is strong and time will likely heal the biggest issues here, but for the time being, the review bombing is pretty intense.
Hunt Showdown 1896 introduces a new map set in Colorado, a new target, a new live event, a variety of performance optimizations, and a totally new user interface. It also integrates the improved CryEngine 5.11, and on the surface gives the tentpole extraction FPS game a fresh lease on life. But this new chapter has so far been met with a substantial amount of criticism from Steam players, with most complaints directed at the UI and new visual and stuttering problems.
On Thursday August 15, 1896’s launch day, 2,131 negative user reviews were posted on Hunt Showdown’s Steam page – based on available data, this is almost certainly the largest number that the game has ever received in a single day. As of this writing, on Friday August 16, players have posted 1,731 negative responses. Of the 6,695 player Hunt Showdown player reviews that have been written on Steam in the past 30 days, only 34% are positive, dragging the game’s recent rating to ‘mostly negative.’
“I was an avid player of Hunt Showdown for a while now before the new 1896 update,” one player writes. “There are a lot of new bugs and issues within the menu not related to how horrifying navigating it is.”
“The recent changes to the UI are very bad,” another player says. “Makes navigating and accomplishing simple tasks laborious and unnecessarily complicated. Less menus that are more information dense would be a huge improvement, or simply returning to the previous UI layout.”
Nevertheless, since the launch of 1896, the player count for Hunt Showdown has hit a new record high – on August 15, more than 60,000 people were playing the shooter simultaneously, the highest number in Hunt’s five-year history.
If you’re a big Hunt fan, you might also like some of the other best multiplayer games, or maybe something a little brutal, a little nasty, courtesy of the best survival games on PC.
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