Xbox Series X|S Review Key Provided By Sumo Digital
Focus Entertainment and Sumo Digital’s Hood: Outlaws & Legends has recently received its first season of brand new content. Season 1: Samhain introduces a brand new character, a full season of unlockables, and even some updates.
The game has come a bit of a way since our review of it, including the sorely needed State Heist mode that should’ve been included at launch. While the inclusion of this addition is welcomed, I believe that it’s too little too late as the player count has dropped significantly, and getting into matches is still as excruciatingly long as it was when the game launched, but I digress.
Improvements
What I’ll talk about first is the updates incorporated with this season as they have a bit of impact on gameplay for the PvPvE game mode. There’s a new winch system setup that changes the endgame of how a match comes to a close. It’s impacted by what your team has achieved during the duration of the game.
If you pickpocketed the Sheriff, opened the vault, and placed the chest, your exit from the heist is made that much easier over how your enemies would fare with none of those achievements at all. This new change is actually a pretty good idea but to be honest, I really didn’t even see it make that much of a difference overall.
Now, let’s get into the bigger and slightly better aspects of this season; the new character Eidaa and the 100 tiers of unlockable content. Firstly, the new character Eidaa is my favorite class and character to play as. She’s considered a hybrid character which means she’s quick but offers a more melee-driven form of combat. She’s weaker than the other melee fighters such as Little Jon or Tooke but makes up for it in her swift maneuvers.
Her quick sword swipes are perfect as her sword is long which makes her reach a bit further. Her heavier attack is a spinning stance where she moves like a deadly ballerina. It’s exactly what the game needed as besides Tooke and Robin, the others just felt ho-hum as far as combat goes. She also has some pretty unique abilities such as her magic forcefield and some bombs that turn their radius into a blue magical area that slows and kills enemies.
Content
Hood’s season pass follows the tried and true formula of every single season pass before it; you have 100 tiers of unlockables for subscribers and/or numerous free tiers for any player. I like the fact that there are free tiers within the game’s season as it doesn’t try to take away freebies from anyone. What I don’t really like is that the rewards for those that do pay money for the season don’t really get anything too interesting in return.
Because there aren’t any enhancements that can be made to weapons, all you have are cosmetics for all five of the characters, their weapons, and some banners. While that has the potential to be cool anyway, most of the cosmetics aren’t anything worth writing home about aside from two or three. Warzone and Fortnite are great examples of a season pass done right, so it would’ve been better for Hood if its creators had taken some notes.
I just think Hood missed an opportunity. It could’ve had unlockable cosmetics that call back to more book-accurate costumes of the characters, or even more over-the-top and imaginative ideas. It just feels like a lazy cash-grab where Focus told Sumo Digital that they needed to add a season pass even if they really didn’t have anything grand to offer. It feels as lifeless as what the game has started to become.
Verdict
Although I really enjoy playing as Eidaa, what stinks is that the game seems to slowly decline in terms of player count. It’s time-consuming to get into matches no matter what mode you try to enter, making her or even a season pass totally unnecessary.
I do have to commend Sumo Digital about the information they take from their community in order to better serve the players in order to create a better experience. Unfortunately for them though, I do believe that this game has more steps that have to be taken for it to be a game worth playing anymore but that can only take so long as players seem to be getting uninterested.
