I wanted to update my review on this game now that I've put another 1,000 hours in this game. Just wanted to share my thoughts...

Fighting
Let me start this off by saying the gun play in this game is absolutely fantastic. Bullet travel speeds are fairly realistic. You can wall bang people if you can predict or hear where they're going. The head shot sound is... satisfying to say the least. I don't agree with the headshot limits of weapons personally but I guess its fine. No other game can give you combat similar to this... I highly suggest giving it a shot as its the best pvp combat I've experienced in PC FPS gaming.

Atmosphere
The games feel is dark and dreadful. It gives you a sense that everything is not ok and that you can die at any moment. I really love how the game gives you these feelings.

Sound
The sound is fantastic. If using a good stereo headset you can tell exactly what direction everything is that you're hearing perfectly. If you hear a player on the other side of the wall reload his weapon or begin aiming down sights you can hear them take a breath. People walking, running, crouching, jumping... You hear everything and you can use this as an advantage. There are small moments when sound breaks a little bit but all around its nearly perfect.

Bosses
Bosses are just ok at this moment... Minus Scrapbeak... The Butcher sets you and the area's on fire and deals heavy damage. His AI is predictable and you can just use a stamina shot and kill him in just a few seconds. The Spider is extremely annoying, its rarely a threat and often just runs from you. The Assassin is also somewhat annoying with its rotations. It can also be stamina axe locked like the Butcher but sometimes becomes completely invincible and just splits over and over until you just let it hit you... Its not the worst but when you really need the banish because a team member has lost a bar this boss can be a pain to banish quickly if it wants to be uncooperative.

*Negatives*
There are a few that can easily be fixed but still have plagued the game since release... Let me be a little more specific though.

-Match Making; Its basically non-existent. In the upcoming patches they claim to be fixing this but I'm pretty sure it won't be changed enough to matter (yet, like always). There are different tiers of players indicated by arrows based on your performance. Double down, down, equal, up and double ups. When playing without skill based match making enabled you will end up in queues with people of all skill levels. There seems to be no focus on people around your skill level, but instead just trying to fill the match with as many people as possible. Enabling skill based match making will prevent you from getting as many up, double ups in your game as long as your teams skill is similar but can still often put players that are far lower than you based on who that team is with. A team that contains 2 equal players may have a lower skilled player with them or a very good player that may be a double up to you can have 2 very bad players with them to allow him to have a lower elo score to end up in your game. Unfortunately being in the higher elo bracket... enabling skill based match making just increases the odds at which when queueing the games will often be empty as there are less people in my bracket queuing than in the lower tiers which can benefit from this. The game doesn't hold your hand and if you're new and not queuing with SBMM enabled you will be put up against the best of the best and new players but you won't know till you fight them. Newer players will find it hard to play with friends who may be veterans of the game because when they queue even with SBMM enabled they will often be fighting people that can completely eclipse them in skill but the game doesn't explain this to you before hand.

-Ping; There are no ping restrictions for queuing into a game. A person from anywhere in the world can queue what ever server they want. I understand where this can be a plus side as many people have friends that live extremely far from them and this can allow them to game together. How ever... Once you start venturing into the 140+ ping area it causes a pretty bad disconnect with game mechanics and even more so when the user has 200+. The game is client side for hit registration and the user with high ping can move on their end and the server moves them later for you. This can lead to you holding an angle on a player and them on their end peeking out and head shot you and on your end they were never visible... They never peeked you from your perspective. Once you check the kill view you can see they did peek you though. Unfortunately you never know if the user has 30 ping or 280 ping. If they could add a feature that would allow users to queue with an option selected that only allowed them to be matched against teams within their own regions (140 or less ping) it would fix this issue entirely. It would still allow users to queue where ever they liked but also allow users who don't want to fight people who are well past their reasonable ping. Its quite unpleasant to be completely behind a stone wall that cannot be penetrated by compact ammo to be shot 1-3 times while fully in cover for over a second to then die to someone well past the reasonable ping limits. If you enable detailed stats and your ping is over 75 it turns read for a reason. The game itself knows your ping is high...

-Toxicity in the Community; There will also be toxic players in the community... I get it. Unfortunately some of them are extremely racist, hateful and target specific people with intent to hurt them mentally. Hunt: Showdown TOS states "Be respectful of other Hunt players. Keep conversations free of any content that is vulgar, excessively violent or contains offensive language. Do not use any discriminatory language, including but not limited to terms regarding ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religion, sexual preference or personal beliefs. No slurs and no hate speech. Do not stalk, harass, or purposely do anything to make others feel uncomfortable and/or threatened." Sadly this is not enforced enough. There are groups of players that target people on Twitch and in game with intent to be hateful toward that user by often stream sniping to get in their game. When full evidence is provided it often leads no where and nothing is done. I would like to see this change as it doesn't promote good gameplay when the TOS is not enforced onto everyone.

-Cheating; In my last review I made a pretty long statement on cheating and I wanted to change what I said. Cheating is in every game, it will always be there as long as profit is to be made and terrible players wanna feel good about themselves without putting the work in. Crytek has done a very good job since my last review about dealing with cheaters. I play this game a lot and I would say I encounter a cheater maybe 0-2 times a month which is far better than 3-5+ times a week. You'll very rarely encounter a cheater now which is a big difference compared to last years review.

Conclusion; Buy this game and give it a shot. There are a few issues with it but nothing to prevent you from sinking tons of hours in this game. The game is a blast once you learn the ropes and start understanding the mechanics and combat well enough. I highly suggest this game to anyone a fan of FPS games and don't mind being challenged. Its quite difficult but worth the grind.