RATING:
Graphics: 7
Gameplay: 7
Performance: 6
Overall: 6.5
Pros: PvE co-op campaign and plenty of game modes.
Cons: Nothing really new.
When thinking about what might be more terrifying than zombies or aliens, the developers of Hounds: The Last Hope came up with alien zombies, making them a major element of the storyline in their latest first-person shooter MMO, in which Earth has been invaded from a gigantic alien spaceship and mankind has been infected with a lethal mutagen that turns them into mindless, flesh-eating creatures. Almost every human is affected, except for the Delta Squad team that players are a member of, the last human resistance sworn to not give up and save the world. We usually don’t care that much about the story and lore of MMO FPS games, but given that fact that Hounds: The Last Hope revolves as much around its in-depth PvE campaign as it dies around PvP battles, this is sort of more interesting and relevant to the game itself.
Each time we’re trying an F2P first-person shooter, our expectations when jumping in aren’t typically raised that high, since we’ve had to get used over time to quite dated visuals and the same outworn mechanics with most of these games that more often that not don’t have anything new to offer to their genre. In the case of Hounds, neither mechanics (which are more or less a hotchpotch of stuff already seen with other titles) nor visuals are what we would call revolutionary; however, the game as such isn’t that bad at all, thus falling in the middle ground for us. In general, the level design and visuals are well laid out and sufficiently detailed, though a few of the edges and up close textures are of a somewhat lower quality with sharp edges and pointy corners that you would perhaps expect from an FPS dating back to 5 or even 10 years ago.
An element of the game that is a bit more different is the ability to pick from 4 distinct classes available in the game: the Assault able to defend themselves from oncoming attacks with their pistol and their riot shield, the Tech equipped with a grenade launcher as well as multiple gadgets to use, the Specialist (Demolitions) and the Support (Sniper). Although the Assault class with their shield may probably be considered the most unique of the classes compared to other titles, it still isn’t anything we haven’t seen in other MMOFPS’s such as GunZ 2 or even traditional FPS games such as Army of Two. Each class’s main weapon can be modified and upgraded in order to provide the player with various skills/ abilities that can be equipped as part of their loadout, meaning that there’s some customisation element included in the game to set the classes even more apart from each other without any class seemingly being imbalanced.
When having a look at the game’s PvP portion, we found the traditional selection of game modes including Point Capture, Sabotage (bomb planting), Team Deathmatch as well as several other classics one would expect to come across in MMOFPS games. It’s undeniably simple and form, but regrettably extremely overused as well and as far as we were able to see throughout our trial, there aren’t any truly innovative things to be found in this either. The most popular game mode seemed to be Team Deathmatch across Makati City, a fine medium-sized map featuring an abandoned urban environment complete with a pedestrian walkway bridge at its centre. In addition, there’s a Harbour map, a Warehouse map, a Town map as well as a few others available for play, which is again the same tired selection of environments already seen in other games before, although we have to admit that they’re pretty well done and make up for their lack in originality with a good flow across the maps.
Regarding combat, it’s quite a typical experience with some attacks requiring dealing some additional damage before you take out your opponent while others are able to kill the enemy with a single shot, the close-up melee attacks using a knife, for instance, which one-shot murder the target character but leave you exposed to counter attacks by others while being locked in a attack animation that last for a good 3 secs. Players are able to roll away trying to take advantage in countering any other player drawing near; however, they’re typically unable to launch more than 2 melees attacks before they have to wait for their stamina to fully replenish, which may turn out to be quite critical in case they miss their initial attack. The ability to stay in the game for a moments after being "killed" allows for calling for help from any nearby team member to try and get the fallen back on their feet in time, which adds some extra strategy to the game. Combat can sometimes be quite frenetic and fast-paced since your health automatically replenishes after a breather.
The ability to interact with a variety of environmental objects was something we actually liked a lot; it was pretty cool to litter the area by exploding barrels, move crates, open doors or jump over barriers. With the exception of leaping through windows or oven barriers, these activities weren’t that present in the PvP matches, but played a major role throughout the PvE campaign.
The story-driven co-op mode of the PvP campaign is where players are able to advance the game’s storyline as they complete the different levels/ stages all the while accepting quests to accomplish along their way, which also comprise some sub quests and even boss quest that grant additional rewards. When launching a PvE stage, it’s up to the player to decide whether to try and tackle it all on their own or to wait for a team to form of a maximum of 6 members. We were daring enough to try completing our initial PvE mission all by ourselves and actually managed to effortlessly get the entire way through to the level’s end, which took approximately 25 min, until ending up surrounded by wave after wave of "Infected" aliens/ zombies in a horde mode. Trying to save some ammo, we initially tried to take some of them out through melee attacks, which allowed them to push a huge wave into the room we’d bottlenecked them into, and as soon as they were in, they immediately were all over us in a swarm so that it was game over.
We felt the game significantly easier when being part of a group, except for the time we were repeating one of the levels when being ambushed all of a sudden by a huge amount of zombies that we’d never come across before and then, when the whole team got killed, we realised that we had been playing in Challenge mode, which was an explanation for the extra difficulty. All in all, the story is fairly attractive, with the missions and maps following comparable themes to the PvP maps, the only main drawback is the extremely cheesy and quite bad voice acting.
The cost for repairing your gear resulted in a greater problem that we had with Hounds, as it can actually wipe out all of your hard earned in-game currency leaving you without any resources to buy enhanced gear when players rack up their fair share of kills with the almost instant respawn timer when you come to actually repair your gear. The repair cost seemingly augments depending on how good your gear is and so we fear that there may be a critical mass point where unless you are an extremely good player you will often be playing the game and spending your own credits to repair the damage you just acquired. We’ve seen similar issues with Warface where players are forced to keep playing the player vs. environment content in order to be able to stay competitive in player vs. player combat and keep their weapons and gear in top condition or risk losing rank due to item degradation.
Overall, Hounds: The Last Hound isn’t bad at all, but would most likely have caused more exaltation some years earlier, now risking to be overlooked in an already overpopulated genre due to not offering anything really capable of making it stand out that much. The things that are done are done well, and the title obviously has an elevated fun factor for sure, a large variety of maps and given its recent launch, the support for new content hopefully is still to come.
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