Nowadays, when the desire of many people to escape from the problems that overflow the everyday life has once again made retro games popular, it is hard to surprise the audience with this kind of projects. But the creators of Huntdown, the Swedish game studio Easy Trigger Games, succeeded.
The game perfectly combines both retro components and modern approaches to the game projects. As for the latter, the game is completely devoid of the player neglect inherent in many of the original early SEGA or NES titles.
The concept behind Huntdown
Huntdown is a two-dimensional 16-bit shooter in the sci-fi action-anti-utopia genre. The player has to choose a character to play through 20 levels. Each of the proposed characters has unique characteristics. Anna Konda has a pistol that fires short bursts. John Sawyer’s weapon can only fire single shots, but has greater killing power. The Mow Man fighting robot has a weapon with relatively low killing power, but with astonishing rate of fire.
Each level of the game offers gamer a journey to the hilarious madness of sci-fi action movies of the 80’s, where one of the main elements was a totally “no-holds-barred buffoonery”. So the opponents of the protagonist will be punks on motorbikes, armed to the teeth “jocks”, ninjas and other colorful characters. Enjoy boss levels, each of which is very well designed and endowed with personality.
The game’s developers deserve the most flattering reviews for not going the way of the creators of a huge number of other retro games, who either unthinkingly or for reasons known only to them copied what the creators of the first games for SEGA or NES did due to lack of experience and skill.
We’re talking about gameplay action built in such a way that in some episodes the protagonist simply can’t escape significant damage. Modern standards of game design and lever-design raised to the rank of mauvais ton such a construction of the game action, when the level can be passed only by not seriously crippling the main character, and even more than once killing and resurrecting him with a loss of game progress.
Developers have long since realized that this kind of level-design “chips” irritate many users and do not add to the popularity of the game.
But creators of many retro games continued to reproduce imperfections of old shooters with maniacal persistence. Thankfully, this is not the case with Huntdown. The game is a perfect combination of retro styling and a modern approach to building gameplay. Even if a character dies, progress is not lost completely on restart, which is great.
The game’s merits.
The game is also notable for the fact that at the very beginning of the process it causes even a slight bewilderment that with relatively simple gameplay it has become so popular with users. But advancing from level to level reveals all its charm and it becomes clear why the game is so loved.
Huntd is a sprinter game, not the kind of game that will make you kill a day or two. The only thing you can do while playing this game is pass the evening. After all, the passage of each level takes no more than 20 minutes. And many users are quite happy with this.