The state of the game as of Nov 2024 is a complete joke. As someone who has been with the game since early access and have sunk just over 2000 hours into it over the past 5 years, I can't bring myself to recommend this game to anyone in its current state. The relaunch of the game in August was supposed to be a saving grace for this game, but it's felt more like the beginning of a slow death. As of the writing of this review, we are still missing two entire maps that were available to play just a few months ago. I get that they made a really cool map for the relaunch (and it is their best map), but it's crazy that there's less content in the game today than before the relaunch.

Let's just put aside all of the asinine balancing decisions that the devs have made over the years (since they are completely subjective) and talk about the game purely from a technical perspective. A recurring theme with the game, which seems to have been exacerbated with the migration to the new engine, is the amount of game breaking/experience ruining bugs present within the game at any given time. This game deserved the amount of negativity it received upon relaunch. The fact that there was a bug that would crash your game for opening the map and it somehow made it through testing is absolute insanity. It's a core mechanic of the game. We still have instances of people crashing when entering dark sight (another core mechanic in the game) and sometimes servers will straight up just die mid-match, boot everyone out and reset everyone's progress to the start of the match.

In their most recent update post, Crytek somehow thought it would be a good idea to be candid about how hard game development is and that they may unexpectedly introduce bugs or create alterations to unintended parts of their code base when pushing through updates. This, to me, just shows that the base upon which the game is built is absolute spaghetti code and even the devs don't understand how it works fully. Let's all be completely honest and say that it's not normal for bugs that were fixed years ago to be constantly resurfacing with each update.

A lighthearted joke in the community for the entirety of the game's lifespan has been that when Crytek introduces or alters X item, it indirectly changes Y item's behavior in the game. This was most commonly referenced when players in the community noticed enemy AI and sound trap (horses, crows, ducks, etc) behaviors changing after a random balance patch. This was a meme, but Crytek has basically confirmed that this is exactly what has been happening for the past 5 years and is the reason for why the game never feels like it's in a "fixed" state.

I think the only reason some veterans of the game are still playing is the unique setting/art style of the game. I'd say that the "aesthetic" of Hunt is carrying about 70% of this game on its back alone. So kudos to the art team in that regard. If you asked me 3 years ago, I would say that the gunplay is the most important aspect, followed by the amazing sound design, but they've been making a lot of changes to the game that has made it feel less unique compared to other shooters on the market.

Speaking of sound design, it became objectively worse after the migration to the new engine. It's crazy that they overlooked such an important part of the game, seeing as how they previously won an award for it. Directional audio is screwed right now; it's hard to tell if someone is above, below or directly on top of you. This wasn't the case half a year ago. There are also sound cues that are either not playing properly or not triggering when they should be. Mainly enemy footsteps and throwables being prepped/cooked could just not trigger for you. My guess is that the geometry of the maps is somehow blocking sounds when it shouldn't be.

Since they basically have drones (beetles), C4 (dark satchels) and Doc's Stim Pistol from R6 Siege (revive bolts), they should probably take another page out of that game's book and carry out their own "Operation Health" for a few months to just focus on fixing this broken-ass game. The cynical part of me thinks that they probably couldn't do it even if they poured all their resources into it, either because the engine is awful, their codebase is a mess or the devs are just not competent enough to carry it out.

TL;DR this game is a technical mess and it's being entirely carried by how unique the gunplay is (or rather, used to be) and its art direction. If a competent competitor were to release a game with a similar aesthetic and gunplay on an engine that isn't complete garbage (yes, I know it's vitriolic, but there's a reason you don't see the Cryengine splash screen on successful games), this game would probably die within a year.

more than 3k hours

Overall it's a very good and unique game, I love it and didn't expect to love him that much.

The problem is that it's run by a company that take only weird and bad decision since 2-3 years, game is full of bug, server are trash, chinese invade our server etc. And they don't do anything to fix that, they are busy doing skin and whatever they are doing, who knows

I won't talk about many aspect coz whatever most people are clueless about some fact, like RNG, camping, toxicit, matchmaking, mmr etc...

Love this game, and Crytek SHOULD BE THANKSFULL to have a community like that, the way they handle things is a shame and a disrespect toward their player.

If you fall in love with the game, you might play it a lot, if not you will just laugh at it and never touch it again, imo. And Crytek can only blame themself

I used to love this game dearly, easily one of my GOTO games when i wanted to play games.. but todays players, jeesus, just cowards and boring matches, glitches etc, i dont know what happened, but event is the only thing keeping me playing this game as for now :/

might change my mind when i see more stability.