Hunt: Showdown

Hunt: Showdown is a multiplayer first-person shooter with three gameplay modes. In "Bounty-Hunt", the player plays as a bounty hunter who hunts down one or two of the game's six bosses to claim a bounty. Players can work on their own or with up to two other players to find clues about the monster's location in the four maps. Each map functions as a medium-sized open world filled with other environmental dangers and enemies such as Grunts, Hives, or Armoreds.

As the player collects more clues, the location of the monster's lair is narrowed down. There are six boss monsters: The Butcher, the Spider, the Assassin, the Scrapbeak, and two Wildcard-targets, the Rotjaw and the Hellborn. Players can use a variety of weapons ranging from shotguns and crossbows, to exotic elephant guns and rifles like the Mosin-Nagant, to defeat their enemies, though the amount of ammo is scarce in this game, forcing players to rely on making their shots count. They also have access to a large variety of tools such as traps and decoys.

Vigil Games, known for the Darksiders series, was shut down by THQ in 2013 as part of the publisher's bankruptcy. While Crytek's founder Cevat Yerli had expressed an interest in bidding for the Austin-based studio based on their work on Darksiders alone (and because Crytek was already planning to establish a US subsidiary in the city), he did not feel that their products fit with the company's business strategy. However, immediately after Vigil was closed, Yerli brought Vigil head David Adams on board to lead the new studio, Crytek USA, citing Adams's leadership skills. In turn, Crytek USA would hire many former employees from Vigil. It was originally stated that the new studio would focus on developing new projects rather than pursue regaining the rights to its former properties; the studio did attempt to regain the rights to Darksiders — but they were instead acquired by Nordic Games.

Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age was announced in June 2014 as Crytek USA's first game. Hunt was designed to be a cooperative game; Adams recalled having been frequently asked about the possibility of adding co-op to a future installment of Darksiders, and stated that "one of the first things we said when we got here was, we are absolutely doing a four-player co-op game. That wasn't even up for discussion". The game is set in the late-19th century, and features weapons and classes reminiscent of the era.

The game received "generally-favorable reviews" upon release according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Critics praised the game for its innovative gameplay-loop and noted that the game offered a unique experience when compared with other multiplayer games on the market, though some critics were disappointed by the game's lack of content at launch.

VG247 praised the unpredictability of Hunt, writing that it "I know where enemies are likely to come from, and what they’re likely to do, and yet every game seems to throw something surprising up...because it simply provides such a broad canvas for imaginative gambits by players". Eurogamer liked the feeling of dread that Hunt created, saying that, "I'm not sure I've played a multiplayer game that breeds such tension since Rainbow Six: Siege". PCGamesN's Benjamin Griffin felt that sound design helped the gameplay be more tense "Flocks of crows, creaking boardwalks, and maimed horses wailing on the ground all signal your presence, while inside, jangling chains and crunching glass are to be avoided". Anthony McGlynn of PC Gamer enjoyed Hunt's twist on the battle royale genre, feeling that the game's focus "about escaping, not killing everyone - is simple but deeply effective". However he criticized the limited number of maps and weapons as making the game feel repetitive past a certain point.