It seems as if IIIFonic ran out of ideas for their games, and had to rely on the Predator franchise to develop their recent game, Predator: Hunting Grounds. The asymmetric multiplayer game is mostly based on the concept of a Shane Black’s movie, The Predator, from 2018. The game will be playable on PlayStation 4 and PC only.
The full version of the game is supposed to hit the stores on 24th April 2020, however, a trial beta version was made available across both platforms on 27th March 2020, for the entire weekend. After playing the trial version for three days, we have managed to put together this game review for you, out of our experiences with the game, so far. But before you proceed with this honest review, mind you, our experiences were not good ones.
An Overall Impression
The first thing that you will notice is the amount of time required for you to proceed into the game. If we talk about some other prominent first-person shooter games, such as Call of Duty, and to some extent the Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds, it makes sense if the game takes its time before letting you into the game. The games have been out for a while now and they have built a number of players over the timespan. Predator: Hunting Grounds, on the other hand, has barely even seen the surface of the water and its servers are overloaded. The developers, however, have responded to this issue and have assured the disheartened gaming community that the issue will be fixed in the actual release of the game. Let’s see how loyal are the developers of their word
Once you have slept your way into the game after a long queue, you take a first look into the game and realize it wasn’t even worth the wait. The shadows are extremely distorted, it feels like the game was better off without the shadow effect. Overall graphics seem out of a game from the early 2010s.
Moving on towards the most crucial aspect of the game, its guns. The guns seem as if they have not been somewhere near to physics, during the development. Personally speaking, even the Call of Duty: Mobile has better shooting dynamics with its auto shooting functionality. Other than that, there is no major difference between the different variety of guns available in the game. However, there are certain unlockable available for gun customizations, but at what cost, when the shooting is not even fun.
The real fun begins when you come across the artificially controlled human enemies in the game. These are the people you have hyped yourself up for! However, if you ask me, doing target practices over some stationery pieces target practice sheets, might be more challenging than aiming down these AI-controlled dummies.
A Little Relief, Maybe?
The game may not be as dull as it seems up till now if you decide to play with the predator. This seems like the focused part during the development. As you level up, predator gets quite a lot of upgrades, such as Plasma Caster, Wrist Blades, Infrared Vision, Stealth Cloaking, and the Predkour Movement. The purpose of the predator is to track down the enemies and finish em before they finish their objectives. However, there is nothing in the game that I found somewhere even near being challenging, but it gets slightly difficult to finish off the enemies if they see you coming or they have the right kind of weapons.
A slight drawback to playing with the predator is that you cannot differentiate between the real players and the AI-controlled ones, but, what difference does it make, you have to blow them all off anyway.
Playing with the predator might add a little fun to the game, but the overall gameplay still remains dull and boring. Just like all other online multiplayer games, this game can be spiced up with a good online company, but if you are stuck with a soldier, instead of a predator, good luck trying not to sleep till the end of the game.
The game has some other shortcomings as well, such as the frame drops once in a while. Frame drops are something pretty common while playing a high graphics game, but experiencing a drop that could put you in the range of thirty frames per second, is not normal and the issue could not be sidelined as a shortcoming, it is a straight-up carelessness at the hands of the developers. Finally, adding a bit of different abilities and powers to differentiate between the controllable soldiers is the least the developers can do for their upcoming big release of the game.