Huntdown

Huntdown: A Classic Side-Scrolling Shooter

Huntdown is the first project from the Swedish development team Easy Trigger, which opened its doors in 2016. This game is a side-scrolling shooter, like classic games like Contra, and it is an experience inspired by action films shown in eighties of the last century. In this review we present this experience to you in more detail.

Events take place in a dystopian future world where crime has spread and gangs control cities amid widespread corruption and weak police forces. This is where your role as a bounty hunter comes in to deter gangs and eliminate their leaders in return for huge sums of money being paid to you by huge corporations whose intentions you don’t know. The game brings us beautiful designs with 16-bit graphics where it has been mastered. The development team designed the different cities with attention to detail, including the effects and movement of the characters. Even the game world in the background is full of details. If you look closely you will see police forces shooting with gangs and you will see vehicles and trains passing through the screen and other details that give life to the cities, music It has an electronic character, is also based on action films that were shown in the eighties and is reminiscent of various classic films and series from that time, with many allusions here and there.

When you start playing, you choose the bounty hunter you prefer from three characters and can switch between them at any time. The differences between characters are related to the strength of their primary weapon and their secondary weapon, which is thrown at enemies. Anna Conda’s character has a pistol that fires multiple shots at once and her secondary weapon is an ax, while the robot Mow Man has a normal pistol that deals moderate damage and his secondary weapon is knives that he throws quickly. Finally, we have former police officer John Sawyer, who excels with a pistol with a slow but powerful rate of fire and the use of the boomerang, which returns from where it was thrown to cause greater damage.

A Challenging Experience with Diverse Arsenal

During the game, you jump and slide on the ground while shooting. They can also hide behind some elements of the environment or hide in other elements. The game will remind you of classic genre games like Contra in terms of presenting a challenging experience with enemies rushing at you from all directions, ensuring the experience is fair. Throughout the stages you will find a diverse arsenal of weapons, including rifles, snipers, cannons, swords and other weapons suitable for different tastes and enemies. The addition of modern game mechanics such as the ability to take cover and hurry has the experience more dynamic made.

The mastery in designing the environments and the futuristic nature of the game was not only limited to the appearance, but also at the design level. There are many secrets hidden throughout the levels, from bags full of money or secret weapons to those who like collecting and as you explore it will be a satisfying challenge to uncover all these secrets. The game features 4 different regions, each offering 4 stages that end with a confrontation with one of the gang’s high-ranking soldiers and then takes you to the fifth and final stage in the region where you confront the gang leader. This is where the mastery of design shows again, as by learning the leader’s attack pattern and stage setting, you will follow a certain strategy while playing, when you reach a certain part when you confront the leader it will appear as if he is watching your moves read as the leader begins to launch a new series of different attacks that will destroy the previous strategy and force you to try to adapt and develop a different strategy. This makes the leader confrontations interesting, especially the gang leader confrontations, which usually consist of… It consists of several stages, and some of these encounters may be flawed by excessive difficulty, which we noticed on a few occasions, but it will not spoil the overall experience for you.

A Fun Experience with Cooperative Play

Huntdown offers a local cooperative play mode to live the experience with one of your companions. The experience has a special flavor for this mode, and you may want to repeat it again with your companions in Badass difficulty, which simulates classic games that mean losing in one fell swoop. It took 6 hours to complete the experience because we knew we didn’t. We discover and collect many secrets hidden in the stages, which will add a few extra hours to your experience. Huntdown is a fine example of masterful presentation of classic games with some modern touches. It’s a fun experience full of well-thought-out challenges and we recommend it to fans of these types of games.