Hunt: Showdown enjoys highest-ever player count after 1896 update, but player complaints about UI are pushing down its Steam review score: 'I've never seen such a bizarre reaction to so much amazing content'

Update 5 PM EST, August 16th: Crytek has commented on the community response to the game's updated menu UI. Read more on this at the bottom of the page.

Grungy horror extraction shooter Hunt: Showdown just received its biggest update in years, with developer Crytek upgrading its engine, overhauling its UI, adding a fourth map called Mammon's Gulch, and introducing other meaningful tweaks. It's such an extensive rework that the game has even been given a new name—Hunt: Showdown 1896.

The first day of availability saw Hunt reach a new high for concurrent players: 59,968, which is 18,000 more than its previous high in October 2023. Likewise, at the time we're publishing this, more than 51,000 are in-game, chasing and/or being immolated by the new Hellborn boss.

By that metric, the shooter is more popular than it's ever been. But simultaneously, the update has drawn aggravated complaints from a number of negative reviews on Steam, 3,730 of them so far, which have pushed Hunt's short-term label to Mostly Negative, while its longer-term state remains Mostly Positive.

How can Hunt both be more popular than ever and be condemned by a higher-than-ever number of players on Steam? The primary bone of contention is its new pre-match UI, shown in the video embedded lower on the page, with many reviewers complaining that Crytek's changes have made it worse rather than better.

The most common complaint about the UI is that it takes considerably more clicks to do most things in the menu than it did before. «Looks fancy but is a nightmare to navigate» says user Shinigaben. «You need 3 or so clicks per action more than the old UI and it also just gives way less information on one screen without switching between various submenus.»

If you've lived through a UI update to a major social media platform like Facebook or Discord, you know that the shift to a new way of presenting information often sparks disproportionate fury. Some Hunt players are under the impression that this more