Review: Predator: Hunting Grounds is a hot mess, but it's great for nostalgia
Hunting Grounds is a multiplayer game that pits four players against a Predator - but it's not a very good one.
Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Get to da console!
The Predator franchise has spawned an innumerable amount of comicbooks, videogames and movies despite very little of them actually being any good - or even financially successful. The fact the franchise continues to keep chugging along however, is testament to how much that first movie nailed its portrayal of the iconic alien hunter.
Predator: Hunting Grounds takes advantage of the Yautja’s cult following, throwing players into an asymmetrical multiplayer experience where a team of four hapless soldiers have to fend off a jungle full of enemies - along with a skull-collecting alien hiding in the branches above them. While Hunting Grounds comes pretty close to the schlocky B-movie fun of the 1987 movie, it’s also rife with technical issues and off-kilter balancing problems.
Stick around
In my experience, a good Fireteam is more or less unkillable. The Predator is going to have to go out of their way to take them down, but it's a walk in the park for the humans. You could go entire matches without having to use a single healing item!
Predator: Hunting Grounds does well in taking Predator (1987) and milking it for fun moment-to-moment gameplay - though its execution is a little inconsistent. Players can choose to be either one of four soldiers in a Fireteam, or the Predator that hunts them in an open environment. The Fireteam goes into a map with a specifically non-Predator-related set of objectives - such as taking down a drug lord, searching for artifacts or scrubbing data from a computer.
Though these missions seem quite different at first glance, every game you play as a member of the Fireteam will usually play out the exact same way. You head to a marked objective, hold a button to complete a task, fight off A.I. enemies and then move on to the next place. You do this over and over again, and once you complete your mission, you’ll be given the all-clear to - as Dutch so famously says - get to the chopper.
Running around the jungle while completing objectives only gets more dull as time goes on, but the anticipation before a Predator strikes is so good.
All of these objectives, while incredibly repetitive, serve their purpose: to turn you into sitting ducks for the Predator, patiently waiting for an opportunity to strike. Playing as the Fireteam is clearly the weaker choice in Hunting Grounds. It would be one thing if you were actually playing as fleshed-out characters from the franchise, but this game puzzlingly forces you to play as incredibly generic soldiers who constantly spout forced one-liners from the films.
Enemy A.I. presents absolutely zero challenge, and gunplay is nothing like what you’ll experience in games like Call of Duty or Battlefield, but it’s serviceable. As you play through the game, you'll find yourself doing the same things again and again - all of which just boil down to filler while you wait for the Predator to show up again. The most fun here actually comes from that delicious sense of anticipation, as you tick off your list of objectives while waiting to hear that unmistakable chittering come from the treeline.
If it bleeds…
Playing as the Predator is a lot of fun, if only for nostalgia. Illfonic definitely got close to something great with their execution of Predator gameplay here.
If you’re not playing as part of the Fireteam, you’re playing as the Predator. The Yautja comes fully equipped with all the various weapons and gadgetry seen in multiple other movies - not just the shoulder cannon and wristblades, but the shuriken, netgun and razor-sharp disc as well. You don’t get access to all of the Predator’s arsenal at first, however. The really good stuff is saved for after you’ve levelled up and gained experience in the Hunting Grounds.
The Predator starts off on the opposite side of the map from the Fireteam. You’ll have very little to go on at first, since there are no floating names in the distance to alert you to your prey’s location. You’ll have to keep an alien ear out for distant gunfire, and switch to thermal vision (which feels great to use) to seek them out.
You can hide in trees and turn invisible as the Predator, but it'll slowly deplete your energy meter.
Fortunately, moving around the jungle is a whole lot more fun for the Predator - making use of what the game winkingly calls ‘Predkour’. This mechanic allows the Predator to run up giant trees, and hop from one branch to another as they hone in on their prey. You can get around the jungle really quickly this way, which is a relief considering how far away the Fireteam can often be.
Once you spot them, it’s killing time. You can fire off a couple shots from the treeline, but it’s only a matter of time before you’re spotted and dealt with - even if you’re invisible. The Predator annoyingly lets out a chittering noise wherever it goes, while making heavy thumping footsteps to boot. It’s impossible to not be noticed by the enemy, so the solution here is to play aggressively.
The Predator is really wimpy
Lore and gameplay tutorials are clumsily added to the game in the form of long walls of text to scrolls through. Why on earth would you force players to squint and read all this just to understand what's going on in the game? It's ridiculous.
And now we’ve arrived at Predator: Hunting Grounds’ biggest problem. The Predator is way, way too underpowered. It can be a constant struggle to eliminate just one member of the Fireteam, let alone all of them. When each teammember is downed, they can still be revived. Even if you go the extra mile and tear out one of their spines, the Fireteam can still revive the player. When the Predator is downed, they can activate a bomb - which can be defused via a simple puzzle, but it’s also ludicrously easy for the Fireteam to just escape its blast radius and still end up winning.
Tack onto that a wealth of healing items and the fact that people are literally killing the Predator with nothing but a knife right now, and you’ve got a game rife with balancing issues. Let’s face it - it’s still more fun playing as a neutered Predator than a couple of unremarkable soldiers, but that only makes this issue sting more. Why is it so hard to win as an alien hunter armed with James Bond-levels of gadgetry, versus a couple of Fireteam members? Give me the satisfaction of downing a powerful alien beast, not this no-threat rookie from outer space.
It’s not all about balancing
The Fireteam is made up of some of the most generic faces I've seen in any videogame, which makes customisation pretty important. You get lootboxes regularly as you level up and fortunately, there are no microtransactions available in-game.
I’d love to say that Predator: Hunting Grounds’ problems end with balancing issues, but that’s far from the truth. This game is a technical nightmare on the PlayStation 4. Environments, while well-structured and expansive, constantly suffer from horrible anti-aliasing issues which do nothing but hurt the eye. All you have to do is turn the camera during gameplay, and you’ll see every bit of distant foliage ripple unnaturally - which seems like something playtesters would’ve picked up on several months before release.
The game also suffers from horrible amounts of framerate drops and bugs, as well. While playing, I would constantly get lag while swivelling my camera around, or have my game freeze in the midst of shooting down enemies. It’s absolutely unacceptable in a multiplayer game, since it’s so easy to get downed in the seconds that the game has been rendered unplayable.
Walking through the same three maps again and again gets old quickly.
On top of that, the AI in this game is absolutely atrocious. It constantly feels like you’re playing on Easy Mode (there are no difficulty modes in this game), with brain-dead stupid enemies running up to your face to shoot you, or running into walls, or even just… standing there, in the distance. Perhaps getting flashes of PTSD from the gunfire all around them. If that’s the case, I applaud this little touch of realism. If not, this game is hopelessly broken.
Hunting Grounds also features a grand total of three (!!!) maps, which is a sad amount for any multiplayer game to launch with. It would help if these maps were diverse, but they’re all sadly set in the jungle - which means that you’ll probably play a few matches before even realising that you've moved from one map to the next. We couldn’t even get a city-set map in the vein of Predator 2? That seems like such an obvious miss.
Verdict
This game has potential, but it's sadly lacking in content right now - and rife with technical issues.
I can’t recommend Predator: Hunting Grounds to anyone but diehard fans of the franchise, and even then - only those who somehow enjoyed Shane Black’s The Predator (2018). Like that movie, this game is an absolute mess with very little to offer, other than the chance to see an iconic ‘80s era villain in the mainstream again. If you're in for that, you might just have a good time.
For everyone else - Hunting Grounds is just barely fun when you’re playing as the Predator, but you’ll have to contend with the many, many other players who want to do so as well. During my first night playing the game, I had to wait upwards of 20 minutes just to get a match - so do with that information what you will. If you’d rather play as the Fireteam, all you have to look forward to are extremely short matches with simple objectives, braindead AI and a Predator that can be knifed to death.
Wait for a sale on this one, or wait for it to get better - whichever comes first.
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