Predator Hunting Grounds - Going On This Hunt Is Not As Fun As It Should Be

Written by Chris Woodside  on May 01, 2020

Reviews: An asymmetrical multiplayer game from the makers of Friday the 13th, where the Predator often feels more like the prey.

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Few movies better define the action-packed explosiveness of the ’80s than the first Predator film. Laying the groundwork for three direct sequels, as well as the crossover franchise with Alien, even relatively younger moviegoers are familiar with the famous “Get to the Choppa!” Schwarzenegger line. Predator: Hunting Grounds is Illfonic’s latest asymmetrical multiplayer game since its release of the ill-fated Friday the 13th in 2017, which ultimately had post-production content halted after a legal dispute over the rights to the iconic horror franchise. Unfortunately, their second attempt at recreating an iconic 80’s film franchise proves to be a step down in quality in virtually every aspect of the game.

Similar to the studio’s last attempt at asymmetrical multiplayer, you have to choose to join a match as either a member of a four squad fireteam or as the titular Predator. For fans of the Friday the 13th game, this seems pretty familiar as you were tasked with either being a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake, attempting to complete a series of tasks to escape alive, or hunt down the counselors one by one as the infamous Jason Vorhees. While it might seem as though this concept for Predator: Hunting Grounds is just a carbon copy of the same game, replacing the campgrounds with the jungles of South America, the games feel noticeably different, which ends up not being good news for Predator.



As the Predator, which was the first match completed for this review, you expect to be able to use the awesome and fearful powers of his movie counterpart to hunt down members of the fire team one by one. After all, by the very nature of an asymmetrical multiplayer game, one side is supposed to be unbalanced compared to the other. Naturally, it would make sense that the extraterrestrial creature with invisibility and stalking superpowers would be the more menacing creature. Unfortunately, this very often proves not to be the case. In the majority of matches, the Predator’s objectives are much less clear and obvious than they are for the fireteam, leaving you to, somewhat blindly, search out for the fireteam. The only time your objective is ever made entirely clear is towards the end of the match when the fireteam has completed their objectives and you must stop them from reaching the chopper. While this does give the player playing as the Predator one last chance to steal a victory, more often than not by the time you arrive, most of the fireteam has already boarded, leaving the Predator screeching into the abyss in the match’s final cutscene.

To be fair, not every aspect of playing as the Predator is uniquely terrible. The first time you take on this creature and have a full range of skills from the infrared laser blast, to the invisibility and heat-seeking mode, it is easy to feel a sense of power and superiority come over you. Hunting Grounds gives you the tools you need to be successful as the Predator, but the choices in game design and gameplay seemingly negate every advantage the Predator has been given. While you can turn invisible, for example, there is a timer that depletes fairly rapidly, which can leave you exposed just before going in for a stealth kill. On the off chance you are hunting a fire team that has fallen asleep with the controller in their hands, which might be the only way to actually track down a team unseen, just a single bullet placed well renders your invisibility entirely useless. While you can remain invisible after taking a shot, a bright trail of green blood begins to leak out, giving away your exact location. It would be understandable if, as a punishment for getting hit, your invisibility wore off, but it seems to be a questionable design decision to give the player the sense they are still invisible, while the fireteam is now hunting the trail of your blood left on the ground. You’d be forgiven if, after several matches of quickly having your health depleted or watching your prey escape, you make the decision to join a match instead as a member of the more often victorious fireteam.



When you first suit up as a member of the fireteam, your initial reaction would be to expect that you are trying to complete a series of objectives, which usually involve taking down the Predator in some way. While all are indeed valid options, including killing the Predator, your time playing as Predator has clued you in to the fact that the Predator is not really your greatest threat here.

Indeed, the threat that finds you more often than the Predator are groups of guerilla soldiers throughout the jungle. As the fireteam, you often are tasked with completing objectives in populated areas, such as defending a location while the computer scans some data, or shooting and permanently disabling pipes throughout the jungle. As you try to do this, more often than not, these AI enemies will come out and start to shoot you. Despite having four members of your fireteam, they never send too many enemies at once, so although they do prove to find you and threaten you more often the player playing as the Predator, they are usually pretty quickly dispatched of before long, and function more as obstacles than as legitimate danger. If somehow, through a stroke of bad luck you find yourself downed, any surviving player has an opportunity to revive you. Even if that time expires, there will then be certain locations on the map where the surviving player can request “reinforcements” which bring you back anyway. All told, unlike the Predator, it is very difficult to die permanently in the match as a member of the fireteam. The best way to avoid death, however, is communication. Whether playing on your own with a random group of squadmates or if you have a group of friends to fill out a team with, the gameplay is enhanced greatly and made much easier by having a microphone and being able to communicate with your teammates. During the course of this review, the extremely small amount of times where the Predator has won, it often correlated with a team that either did not have microphones or communicated poorly.



There are other differences, besides gameplay, that come with choosing which side you will play as. Perhaps most noticeably were the six minutes or more wait teams to join a lobby if you choose to play as the Predator. Conversely, it was possible to join as a member of a fireteam in less than thirty seconds. Its understandable that this might also be influencing the unbalanced gameplay, as it suggests some of the more skilled or seasoned players are joining as the fireteam more often than not. While wait times are not always the end of the world for most games, in a game such as this with just one single mode to play, it is hard to believe there will be much gas in the tank for very long if wait times are not improved to play as the Predator.

Despite the many legitimate struggles this game has, there are some moments where you will genuinely feel a level of entertainment during the course of a match. For the rare time when the fireteam and Predator actually collide, the tension and action do genuinely evoke the same feelings you would get watching one of the movies for the first time. As that first laser blast comes down from the trees, possibly taking out a member of the fireteam and alerting the rest to the Predator’s presence, the ensuing action is genuinely fun and well crafted. The problem is, this happens far too rarely during the course of each 15 minute match.



While the game does offer some progression rewards to break up the monotony of each match, the customization options, and other rewards as you progressed and earned XP is fairly lacking. It might do enough to hook some players relatively new to the genre, but I found it didn’t provide anything novel to the concept that is not already seen in staple multiplayer games like Call of Duty. Still, it is nice to have something to work towards to keep players coming back after fairly lengthy matches, and also encourages you to switch up playing as the fireteam versus playing as the Predator, even if the gameplay will sometimes make you regret that decision.

Its also noticeable that Hunting Grounds offers crossplay support. For a game published by Sony, this is definitely a step in the right direction to offer this feature at launch, as Sony has been notoriously slower to roll out that feature. This allows players on the PS4 to join matches with users on PC, where Predator: Hunting Grounds is available on the Epic Games Store. However, this feature seems to be a necessity more than anything else, as if player pools were segregated by gaming device, the matchmaking times would likely increase exponentially for a game where it is already a problem.



On Playstation, the game just does not run as smoothly as it should. In multiple matches, mostly as the Predator, it is possible to experience bizarre graphical and gameplay glitches. As you make your way through the trees of the jungle, its not entirely uncommon to randomly fall from a branch and enter an annoying loop of going back to the branch and falling off, which is very difficult to break out of. After waiting several minutes to even get matched into a game as a Predator, it is frustrating to have bugs like this that ruin your match. None of the bugs I encountered could accurately be described as game-breaking, but they do definitely spoil the experience in notable ways.

Predator: Hunting Grounds tries in many ways to build off the legacy of Friday the 13th, which left many fans without the closure of updated content because of the legal disputes. While Predator: Hunting Grounds definitely does have some genuine moments of tension, action, and excitement, these moments don’t do enough to distract from the sometimes excruciatingly long match times, overly unbalanced gameplay, and frequently annoying bugs to justify the surprising $40 price point. If Illfonic is able to continue to update this game and better balance the gameplay, there is some real potential here, and it is clear that there is a genuine appreciation for the source material, but the game as is misses the mark in far too many ways.