Hunting grounds, only for fans

• May 3, 2020
• revision
• technolust

• Florin Cașotă

Predator: Hunting Grounds is a multiplayer video game for PlayStation 4 and PC in which you enter the skin of the famous Predator or you can play with one of the members of the rifle team that has to kidnap him.

The game does not have a single player campaign, but it is only multiplayer. So, before entering a match, you must choose the camp where you want to play or let the fate decide for you. If you are a Predator, your mission is to exterminate the team of people, and if you play with people you have to do certain tasks (they have already communicated to you) such as going there and you must do x or y, this while you must be careful and Predator.

Anyway, those little missions don’t matter. All that matters is killing the creature. The action takes place in the lush jungle that appears in the Predator movies.

The concept may be interesting, but the execution is not good. The first “feeling” I had when I entered the game was not pleasant and did not change during several multiplayer games.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Predator: Hunting Grounds doesn’t feel like a premium game, but rather a generic one made by a small team with limited resources.. Here I mean the look of the game and the way the character moves or the way the weapons work.

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Maybe that wouldn’t have been a big deal if the game was fun or interesting. But here also follows a generic model. You choose a character that only has certain weapons and abilities available at first, and unlock others by gaining experience through combat.

Character customization is decent and not done through micro transactions, which is a good thing. Character development could be a reason to play Predator: Hunting Grounds, but the weapons aren’t varied enough (and their use isn’t satisfying either), their abilities aren’t terribly useful, and so on.

It’s exciting at first when you see the Predator through the trees, but after ten matches the enthusiasm subsides. It is somehow more interesting to play with the Predator because you are in the position of a hunter, but at first all you can do is jump out of the trees, hit an enemy multiple times, become invisible and jump back into the trees. After gaining experience, you unlock other cool creature weapons from the movies.

And so on until all the equipment is finished. However, the biggest problem for me, I think, was the very stupid AI in the game. I haven’t seen such “clueless” enemies in a long time. As I was saying, small missions are inserted into the game that also involve AI controlled entities. I am very easy to kill, the lack of intelligence is brilliant and I had moments of turkey laughter. Updates have been made since launch, but the issue has not been resolved.

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In the end, I really don’t understand the scoring system at the end of games. In a game I played with the Predator, people kidnapped me, but I activated the self-destruct feature (my opponents didn’t go out of range, either). This is how we all die and in the end we all receive experience (both me and them). It would have seemed fair to me that they had gained a lot of experience and that I had less because they had defeated me.

In my opinion, Predator: Hunting Grounds is a game only for movie fans who want to live their own virtual adventure in the skin of the creature on the big screen. Otherwise, those who want an exciting multiplayer game have several options available.

If you want to play it, you can buy it for PlayStation 4 here or you can get it from Epic Games for PC here.