Hunt: Showdown is designed as both a cooperative and competitive multiplayer game. You could say that your experience on Hunt: Showdown is completely a multiplayer experience, except for the rare instances where you end up in a lobby with no other players. Let’s run down the multiplayer experience of Hunt: Showdown together!

The Main Lobby

Hunt: Showdown's Main Menu and Lobby

As a multiplayer-focused game, Hunt: Showdown’s features are mostly centered around its multiplayer system. Right when you log in to the game, you are greeted by a main lobby simplified to cater to quick setup and deployment to games. Notably, you will find that the biggest and most visible buttons on the main lobby are the Matchmaking/Play/Ready button and the co-op matchmaking drop down menu right above it.

You can feel from this simplified setup that your attention is immediately drawn towards the highlighted buttons to start playing. Clearly, Hunt: Showdown does not care for loitering around in the main lobby. You’re better off channeling your inner Mulan and get down to business to defeat monsters.

Kidding aside, the main lobby’s simplified design makes maneuvering through the different menus easy. You will spend less time fidgeting and floundering about looking for the hunter customization menu, the arsenal menu, or even the lore journal database, giving you more time to spend simply playing the game and blasting your guns left and right. 

This simplified main lobby gives Hunt: Showdown that no-nonsense feel to get you boots on the ground as soon as possible.

The Game Modes

The two game modes of Hunt: Showdown

In the main lobby, you can choose the game mode and the team size. The two main game modes of Hunt: Showdown are bounty hunt and soul survivor. Bounty hunt is the classic game mode where you go into a map with up to twelve players max in each instance. soul survivor, on the other hand, is Hunt: Showdown’s take on the standard Battle Royale format where you have to acquire and hold a “wellspring” for a certain amount of time to extract as the sole survivor, needless to say that you need to either stay away from other hunters or eliminate them altogether.

Bounty Hunt is the game mode that defines Hunt: Showdown. In Bounty Hunt, your ultimate goal of each match is to eliminate the boss monster, retrieve the boss bounty, and extract with the boss bounty. On the way to achieving that goal, you are exposed to all sorts of threats, ranging from wild zombies and special zombies to other players.

With each player vying for the same goal, this game mode is sure to test your skills and strategy. You’ll have to make quick decisions on when to fight and when to flee. You’ll also need to properly plan out how to engage in each battle so as to either eliminate the enemy team or simply survive the encounter.

Soul survivor, on the other hand, is focused solely on the fighting mechanics of Hunt: Showdown. Soul survivor focuses on getting the wellspring and surviving for a set amount of time to be crowned the “soul survivor” of the match. In this game mode, you spawn as a random hunter with a random loadout and your whole focus is to fight and survive. 

Your ultimate goal is to be the one holding the wellspring when the time runs out by either killing the other players or simply surviving them. To do this, you will need to scavenge for items along the way, like in any standard battle royale game, and use the scavenged weapons and items to defeat the other players. The bonus for surviving the soul survivor game mode is that you get to keep the hunter you randomly spawned with for that match.

Teams: Duos and Trios

Team Sizes in Hunt: Showdown

In the main lobby you are also to choose your team size: duos or trios. This choice determines what kind of bounty hunt game you’ll be queuing for. Note that regardless of your choice, each match will have a maximum of twelve players which means that there can be up to six teams in duos and up to four teams in trios.

Additionally, team matches only apply to the bounty hunt game mode because soul survivor is completely a solo battle royale experience. You can also tick a box in the main lobby which gives you the option to be queued with random players, forming an impromptu team, or to play solo.

Regions

Hunt: Showdown's Regions and Servers

Hunt: Showdown prides itself in its steady servers and connections. To this end, the developers have ensured the availability of region-specific servers. These servers allow you to choose which regions you want to play in for better connection or for better communication.

Sometimes, you’d find yourself playing Hunt: Showdown while traveling or in a different region of the world where the local dialect is not your spoken language. In these cases, Hunt: Showdown allows you to choose your preferred region to allow you to communicate with your team in your spoken language in exchange for some latency.

Matchmaking & Skill Levels

Hunt: Showdown's MMR rating system

Hunt: Showdown has a skill-based matchmaking system. The matchmaking system even includes a statistic which shows how many percent of the players are categorized into each skill level. This matchmaking system ensures that you are always matched with similarly skilled players to give you a reasonably challenging match.

More often than not, you would find yourself rated around the three star skill level rating. Don’t be alarmed because this is normal. The statistics of Hunt: Showdown’s skill level distribution finds more players populating the three and two star skill level than those above. It is definitely harder to climb Hunt: Showdown’s skill rating system than it is to drop in the ratings.

As you learn and enhance your skills in Hunt: Showdown, you will realize how accurate the skill rating system of the game is. You will find that players of higher skill level have a different level of attention to detail which allows them to perform wallbangs more often and to easily detect and disarm traps. You will also find that high skill level players are more efficient with their shots, taking clear shots and avoiding narrow shots that are more likely to miss.

Consequences

Death can come at any moment in Hunt: Showdown

Hunt: Showdown is a game of high risk and high reward. By high risk, I mean that you will lose your hunter if you die in-game. You will lose everything that hunter brought with him/her into the match, along with the abilities and traits you’ve unlocked for that hunter.

However, there are also a lot of rewards to reap from a successful bounty hunt. Whenever you succeed in a bounty hunt, you get a ton of experience points to level up your hunter and skill points to spend on traits. These traits that you will spend on will enhance your gameplay and highlight your skills and strategies with that hunter. Also, when you are able to defeat other players, you are able to loot their hunters for their weapons and a random consumable to go with it. You will find that going into a game with the cheapest weapons can sometimes earn you the most expensive weapons as a reward by eliminating enemy players and looting their hunters.

Note that you will still need to properly plan your actions in every match because you do not want to suddenly lose a hunter from carelessness.

Post-game

Hunt: Showdown's post-game mission summary screen

When a match ends, you are presented with a mission summary which shows all of the information which your team was able to accomplish, including player kills, boss kills, and many more. From this mission summary, you can tell how well you did and how your strategies paid off. You’ll be able to do a proper debriefing with your team at the end of the game because of the amount of information available from the mission summary.

Conclusion

Hunt: Showdown’s Co-op experience is really a competitive co-op experience where  you fight off against other players and AI monsters. It is a skill-based fps game with a high-risk high-reward scheme that simply leaves you wanting more!