#bigalpha

Playing a Hunter is something between Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. The Hunter team is made up of four players, each one playing one of four classes: Assault, Trapper, Support, and Medic. Assault brings on moar dakka, Trapper keeps the Monster from running away, Support... supports, and Medic has ways of keeping everyone alive and disabling the Monster. I'm being a bit vague about the roles here because each role contains more than one character. Two characters have been revealed in each role thus far, with a third character per role planned before release. Each character brings something different to the table. For example among the Supports Hank has a shield projector for protecting other players while Bucket can deploy sentry guns. For the Medics, Val has a Team Fortress heal-beam, while Lazarus can't heal his teammates but can instead revive them without penalties. Each class has an ability shared between all characters in that class: Assault has a temporary personal shield, Medic has an area-effect healing pulse, Support has an area-effect cloaking field, and Trapper gets one of the game's iconic gimmicks: the Mobile Arena, a temporary forcefield-dome that forces both Hunters and Monster to stand and fight.

And everyone has a jetpack. I can't emphasize this enough. Jetpacks make everything better.

As you might imagine, the Hunters depend heavily on communication and each player knowing how to best leverage their unique tools. This brings up one of my first concerns: that a good game will depend on the hunters being able to work well together. All it takes is one guy wandering off on his own, or, to take an example completely at random and definitely not something that I have been guilty of, a Trapper who puts down the Arena while everyone's at low health to turn a game from an even match into a quick defeat. Enough games that end like that and one threatens to unleash the internet rage. Then again, the teamwork aspect is easily a big part of this game's appeal, and is easily even more important than it is in games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. The degree of cooperation that the Hunters need to bring to the table reminds me more of games like Guns of Icarus Online or Dota of Smite Legends. In that respect, this game has fantastic balance between the four roles, and, this is important, gives everyone an active role to play in combat. The Assault not only does lots of damage but will need to try and draw the Monster's attention from their squishier team-mates. The Medics are equipped with sniper rifles that create weak points in the Monster's armor for others to shoot. The Support tends to have the most damaging weapons after the Assault, and after the Mobile Arena is dropped the Trapper tries to restrict the Monster's movement with harpoons. Every player needs to be able to balance attacking the monster and supporting their teammates. When a good team comes together it's a fantastic experience.

The Monster, strangely enough, feels a bit like I'm playing a 3rd-person MOBA, like SMITE or Super Monday Night Combat. You've got a basic attack and four different abilities on cooldowns. These abilities can be unlocked and leveled up each time the Monster evolves. Each monster also has a mobility mechanic, with Goliath leaping over tall buildings great distances and Kraken able to hover through the air, and the ability to rapidly climb up most cliffs. Despite the Hunters' jetpacks, I feel that the Monster is still more mobile than them in most cases. The Monster starts out at level 1 with three points to put into abilities and is at its most vulnerable. By hunting down and eating the wildlife scattered around the map, the Monster builds its evolve meter and its armor bar. The armor bar is essentially an extra health bar, and this is important since the Monster has very few ways of regenerating its health. Every time the Monster evolves the player gets another 3 points to put into their abilities.

Another criticism that can be placed on this game's doormat is that a good match will depend a lot on a good Monster player as well. I've found that the best matches, won or lost, were the ones in which the Monster was able to outwit the Hunters, and pull off a couple of engagements leaving the Hunters weakened. Every time a Hunter is incapacitated they lose a portion of their maximum health. Fall too many times or bleed out, and the Hunter is forced to wait until the Dropship arrives to put them back on the map.  At the same time, the Hunters are taking chunks out of the Monster's health bar. Eventually, someone makes a mistake - the Monster gets caught while evolving, or the Trapper drops a dome when the Monster's at level 3 and full armor - and the game's decisive engagement plays out. However, if the Monster gets caught early, or just can't seem to focus any of the Hunters down, it's just a letdown (if you're reading this and had me as the Monster, my condolences). Plus, playing the Monster is such a different experience from the Hunters that population issues might become a problem later in the game's life; not enough people wanting to play one side or the other.

As with Titanfall, I think the main concern here will be whether or not the game has enough variety or will be engaging enough on the long term to keep people coming back, as it's multiplayer-only. It's difficult to get a feel for the differences between maps when you're constantly moving, chasing or being chased, and I never did get to play as the Kraken, never mind the Hunters and Monsters that have yet to be revealed, so this is a difficult issue to judge. I'm also not sure if the in-game progression system really adds anything to the game. Doing X things with X weapon unlocks buffs and eventually other characters and skins for characters in a class, as well as leveling up the player's account and unlocking perks that a player can select for their character before a match. Perks I'm fine with, since you start with one and you can only use one in any given match, but the buffs to weapons and needing to unlock more characters in a class just rubs me wrong. It feels too much like they're worried that people will stop playing if they get to use all the toys off the bat. Maybe it's just a modern triple-A game thing, but I can't help but recall that games like, oh, I don't know, Tribes 2, Unreal Tournament, or Team Fortress 2 managed to last for years without any progression system or unlocks. (Yes, there was a time when TF2 didn't have crafting or hats, and the only weapons you had were the default ones. Strange, I know)

I've managed to make it this far without even mentioning the role that wildlife plays in both helping and hindering the Monster and the Hunters, but I think I'll leave the article here. I've only played for a handful of hours, and that was at an embarrassingly low framerate for much of the time. It definitely charmed me, or perhaps I should say got its claws into me, har har har, but I can't yet say for sure whether or not it's got staying power. What it's got, though, is a new approach to the venerable first-person-shooter deathmatch, and one that seems to be working really well so far.

A note: all things considered, I get the nagging feeling that this 'Alpha' was more for publicity than anything, but the extra server load did end up playing merry hell with matchmaking until a hotfix was pushed out, and I suspect a lot of optimization is still left to complete. The loading times are surprisingly long too, which can get frustrating when a match ends up shorter than the time it took to load the map in the first place. These problems aren't limited to me, I swear. I did some research. I've got integrity, you know. A bit. Somewhere.

-Taihus, the evolving raincoastgamer