Predator: Hunting Grounds PC Review 5/10 "The devil is in the details" 💀 @IllFonic @PHGTheGame

You can see why they thought this would work. Asymmetric horror-themed multiplayer is IllFonic’s bread and butter and the much-missed Friday the 13th: The Game did an incredible job of putting you in the sneakers of hapless Camp Crystal Lake counsellors… or wielding the machete of Jason Voorhees.

If you were perusing other 1980s IPs looking for something to fit into the Friday the 13th mould, Predator makes a lot of sense. The all-timer 1987 Predator sees a group of macho characters who already feel like they’ve been lifted out of a video game battling against a single powerful adversary - the ideal recipe for asymmetric multiplayer.

And so Predator: Hunting Grounds was born.

But the devil is in the details and the more you examine the themes of Predator, the less this game works. The core message of Predator is a deconstruction of the musclebound gun-toting macho hero (and by extension U.S. 80s foreign policy), perfectly embodied by Arnie’s Dutch. Over a svelte 107 minutes, Dutch and his crew of testosterone-jacked lunks realize their brawn and bullets are no match for an enemy beyond their understanding. The power imbalance between the Predator and the soldiers is the point, they simply cannot compete. 

But when it comes to a multiplayer game, balance is mandatory. Hunting Grounds pits a team of four players as soldiers against one player-controlled Predator and pains have been taken to ensure that victory is as achievable for the soldiers as the Predator. Soldiers must dash around the jungle in first-person activating nodes while fighting AI-controlled soldiers, while the Predator stalks from the treetops in third-person.

If Hunting Ground were faithful to the movie the Predator would have the upper hand at all times. But, as this is a competitive video game, that isn’t going to fly. What you end up with is an iffy Call of Duty clone in which the Predator is ultimately more of an annoyance. The Predator player is encouraged to play stealthily and so doesn’t have a huge amount of health, making it easy for even a slightly coordinated team of soldiers to cut him down in a blizzard of gunfire. 

And, naturally, the Predator in Hunting Grounds is only as lethal as the person controlling him. In the matches I played, he was less the galaxy’s greatest hunter and more like a scaly Mr. Bean, tumbling out of the trees to ineffectually flail around with his wrist blades as the soldiers paint the jungle with glowing green blood. Maybe my experience would have been different if we’d had more competent Predator players, but I never played against anyone who seemed to know what they were supposed to do.

And, cards on the table, whenever I strapped on the mask and attempted his deadly parkour (or ‘Predkour’ as the game would have it) I also ended up pratfalling into disaster and being turned into bullet-riddled mincemeat. I imagine the experience would be much tenser with an expert player-controlled Predator, but we’re now four years on from Hunting Grounds' initial release, and even with a new PS5 patch there simply aren’t many people still playing.

The final wrinkle that comes with this overly squishy Predator is that downing him allows the soldiers to win the match by extracting his body. This requires defending it from a few waves of very dumb enemies until a chopper shows up, which is so easy to do that the majority of my matches ended with the same extraction cutscene and our original objectives abandoned. 

Finally, but depressingly, it’s sad that the game is so buggy and unstable four years on and after many patches. Textures and lighting flicker distractingly (particularly during cutscenes), there are some audio glitches where sounds refuse to play, and a smattering of crashes compounded by the bots parachuted in to replace missing players not being particularly competent.

It’s frustratingly easy to imagine a good asymmetric multiplayer Predator game. For example, the long-defunct player vs player vs Batman, Arkham: Origins made that game’s stealth function online, and going further back there’s the excellent spies v mercs Splinter Cell multiplayer. My ideal version of the concept would be to slow everything down so players aren’t charging through the jungle at Doomguy velocities, have the soldiers focused on survival and escape rather than pursuing objectives, make killing the Predator incredibly difficult, and generally to crank up the paranoid tension of fighting an invisible foe in the jungle as much as humanly possible.

SUMMARY

There is some fun to be had in Predator: Hunting Grounds, but despite its promise, it’s a shadow of the game it could have been.

There’s a surface-level aesthetic faithfulness to the IP, but it’s a swing and a miss on capturing the themes and message behind the 1987 classic. 

5/10

💧MELTING💧

[ Some technical problems exist and/or the game just feels too generic or flat to recommend ]