Hunt: Showdown’s Solo Quickplay Is The Best Battle Royale

The battle royale genre has had a meteoric rise in popularity over the last few years, but Hunt: Showdown has quietly offered a contender for the top spot. The Bounty Hunt game mode is why most players check out Hunt: Showdown, but the solo-only Quickplay is a fascinating and dynamic take on the battle royale formula. It has the benefit of offering plenty of incentives to players, while bringing a wholly unique BR experience to the table.

In comparison to more popular battle royale games, Hunt: Showdown‘s Quickplay is tiny with its maximum 12 players per match. The sequence of events isn’t too far off of Bounty Hunt – players search compounds for Rifts (Quickplay’s version of Bounty Hunt’s Clues), with each one reducing the number of locations where another can be found. Unlike Bounty Hunt, though, Quickplay doesn’t allow players to make a load out beforehand, instead being equipped with a melee tool, a medkit, and one random starting weapon. All sorts of weapons, consumables, and tools can be found around the map while searching for the Rifts. Being the first player to close four Rifts opens the Wellspring, which reveals that player’s location for everyone else, kind of like when one of Hunt: Showdown‘s four bosses is banished in Bounty Hunt.

The player that opens the Wellspring then has to defend themselves until the timer runs out, with every other player they kill accelerating the process. Killing the player in control of the Wellspring transfers it to the killer, essentially making it a BR with a King of the Hill ending. Only the final holder of the Wellspring leaves the Quickplay match alive, where that Hunter can then be recruited by the victorious player for Bounty Hunt. There’s no entry fee for Quickplay, so the game mode has no risk, but a very good reward for the winner: a slightly leveled Hunter that may be fully equipped if enough items were looted during the match. This alone is a great incentive to play Quickplay, but the game mode itself sports an emergent gameplay loop unmatched in battle royales.

Hunt: Showdown’s Quickplay Has More Nuance Than Other BRs

Quickplay in Hunt: Showdown has the same basic goals as other battle royale titles – loot, survive, and kill other players – but has a lot more going for it. The ulterior motive of wanting to keep the Hunter alive for recruitment into Bounty Hunt adds another layer of gameplay on top of just wanting to win. It makes avoiding combat until attempting to snatch the Wellspring at the very last second a viable strategy, but the opposite is also frequently effective. Shirking Hunt‘s usual quiet and methodic play style for a blitz to find four Rifts can position the Wellspring activator in a defensible position, but maneuvering quickly through a few compounds is almost sure to draw attention. Additionally, taking the time to search a compound can lead to very good loot, especially in events like the recent Hunt: Showdown Winter Solstice, where Quickplay is an easy way to acquire Event Points.

The most important gameplay element which helps Hunt Quickplay stand out from other BRs, though, is the central importance of the Rifts. Each of the 16 compounds holds at least one Rift, which naturally draws players toward one another for reasons other than just loot. Once a fight starts – which can be heard from a great distance – other players have to decide between engaging and potentially eliminating rivals, or continuing on to the main objective of activating the Wellspring. Quickplay functions just like other battle royales, drawing every player eventually to the same location, but without an ever-shrinking ring to artificially force them. The hunt for Rifts and the eventual opening of the Wellspring make for an incredibly organic gameplay loop, where player agency is a primary factor in determining the course of events, the next best thing to more procedural generation in battle royales. It may not have 100 players airdropped into the map, but Hunt: Showdown‘s Quickplay stands apart from other battle royale games because of its incredibly unique and compelling gameplay.

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