Hunt: Showdown's Steam reviews take a battering after the colossal 1896 update brings dreary UI and stuttering to the gothic PvPvE shooter

The recent overhaul of Hunt: Showdown, dubbed 1896, has been met with a barrage of negative reviews on Steam, with players citing issues with the new UI, poor PC optimization, and confusing game mechanics.

Hunt: Showdown's big new update should've been a smash-hit success, but it's being review-bombed by PC players instead.

Hunt: Showdown 1896 launched yesterday, August 15, effectively replacing the older version of the vanilla base game with a complete overhaul. On the PC side of things, Hunt: Showdown now takes advantage of DirectX 12 and brand new upscalers like NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, and graphics have also been upgraded with HDR support and a revamped 3D audio system.

The new update also boasts a Colorado-based map called Mammon's Gulch, offering 16 unique compounds for players to loot and surely the more horrible way to die. There's also a brand new Wild Target, dubbed 'Hellborn,' which tracks players down using the Dark Sight ability, something players have always had in their arsenal from day one.

So what went wrong? If you head over to Hunt: Showdown 1896's Steam store page now, you can see it's accrued an aggregate player review rating of 'Mostly Negative' after 6,041 new player reviews, with just 36% of reviews over the past 30 days being positive. Players are sounding off in their reviews about why the overhaul has fallen short of their expectations.

"New [user interface] is bad and it's basically only aimed at console. Please give us the option to either use the old one, or make a new one aimed at desktop," reads one review. This is actually a common throughline among the negative reviews - developer Crytek has implemented a new UI system for Hunt: Showdown 1896 that isn't going down well at all.

"Honestly, I can't play the game anymore. I don't have the patience to click through another Netflix-style menu, not understanding where I am, what I am doing, and where I have to go to set up my hunter for the next game," reads another similarly negative review. The same review writes that even inviting other people to your game is now particularly confusing.

Another review bemoans poor PC optimization, leading to "random fps drops, lags, freezes, and crashes." The same review claims that the "graphics don't look so much better while system requirements increased dramatically," while another review claims to see stutters every time they shoot or are shot at, which is pretty prohibitive in a shooting game.

At the time of writing, developer Crytek hasn't responded to the negative reviews and player complaints. Then again, the update hasn't even been live for 24 hours at the time of writing, so the developer is likely still collecting and assessing feedback.

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