1/7/2024 0 Comments Hashtag hashbrown huntdown![]() There are some small missteps along the way, admittedly, but they're small enough to overlook, and could well be down to a simple matter of taste - there's full voice acting from the protagonists and main antagonists, though the crisp recordings sit a little uneasily with the rest of the aesthetic, and the propensity to just numbly reel out overused action movie quotes ended up grating more than it endeared me to it all. There is variety here, though, in the wrinkles provided by the three playable characters, in the drop-in co-op mode or in the score attack and side objectives tucked into each level. It's worth noting that Huntdown puts up a stern challenge, even on its lower difficulty levels, and it's also heavy on boss encounters - if not quite a full-on boss rush like Alien Soldier, there's certainly little breathing room between encounters with the big bads, and it's these that form the bulk of Huntdown's 2-3 hour runtime. There's a lot of The Warriors in Huntdown, but there's also a lot of. Elsewhere, the simple act of crouching from a sprint sets you sliding on your knees, Vanquish style, before you push up against cover or maybe just unleash both barrels into an enemy's nether regions. Within your moveset there's some neat detail, too - if an enemy gets too close you can kick them back, tossing them in the air ready to be juggled with a stream of bullets. Like Rolling Thunder there's a heavy use of cover, be that ducking into doorways or behind crates and barrels, and the action is intense enough to ensure you're best carefully pushing forwards rather than running carefree through the mobs. There's an emphasis on the gunning over the running in Huntdown - a polite way to say its platforming can fall flat, but it's not so much an issue when the combat is so chunky and considered. Good god this thing is gorgeous, the density of its vision bringing its scuzzy streets alive. Put that down to the detail, the screen filled with the kind of incidental action and depth just not possible in the era which Huntdown's style apes. The work of small Swedish team Easy Trigger Games, Huntdown is a run and gun game cast in the mold of Contra and Rolling Thunder, with an artstyle seemingly borrowed from Bitmap Brothers in their prime: it's all muscular design and brooding shadows, and it looks frankly spectacular. ![]() Availability: Out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Switch.For shame, really, as I picked it up a few months later and realised Huntdown stands apart from others of its ilk, partly thanks to how it leans into all that excess while delivering a brilliantly taut action game at the same time. So pervasive is that influence, though, that it can become a bit wearying - which is my excuse for missing Huntdown first time around when it came out last May, its 80s excess getting lost in all those other similarly themed games drowning out the storefronts of the eShop and Steam. Small wonder that the era's been plundered so heavily by video games ever since - these VHS wonders are shorthand for the kind of hedonism and excess we pick up our controllers for in the first place. It's an incontrovertible truth that the recipe for the ultimate Friday night in involves a stash of cheap beer, some cheap weed and a scratchy 80s sci-fi classic where it soon becomes clear the cast and crew were indulging in much the same throughout the shoot: The Hidden with its machine gun wielding strippers, or Night of the Comet with its post-apocalyptic shopping mall shootouts. ![]() A 2D run and gunner that's as in your face as an 80s Troma classic, Huntdown matches its excess with brilliant detail.
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