Out of breath and nearly out of bullets, I take cover on the roof of Lawson Station. The last surviving enemy trio has been chasing me down from a compound away, and they now know that I'm a solo player. As I frantically load the last few slug rounds into my shotgun, I can hear their footsteps approaching on mud, then a metal ramp, then on concrete. I know two of them are using long-range rifles because I heard them firing from across the map. I heard the other shooting at me with a revolver, so it's more than likely they have a shotgun that'll destroy me up close. If I can let them get into the middle distance, and I time my ambush just right, I might be able to catch them off guard.
Such is life in Crytek's now five-year-old first-person shooter, Hunt: Showdown. I started playing this game in April of 2020, and I recently passed the 2,000 hours played mark. While that's a fairly vomit-inducing amount of time to spend playing any video game, I am silently proud of that accolade. Until picking up Hunt, I hadn't played 1,000 hours of a single game, and now there's barely a day that goes by where I don't think about this enthralling shooter.
