In Hood: Outlaws and Legends, two teams of four players each compete in pulling off perfect heists. The third party is controlled by the AI. Guards will try to defend a treasure in a castle. Your goal is to steal the key from one of the guards, find the treasure, take it to a ship and extract it. But be careful: your enemies have the same goal.
Content
There are four classes. All of them have different abilities but you’ll know them from plenty of other games. There’s a tank, archer, and so on. The before-described game mode is the only one as of now and there are five different maps.
Stealth or Not?
While they advertise it as being a stealth game, it mostly feels like a straight-up “Team Deathmatch”. Stealth is possible but not needed, especially at a low skill level. Most people won’t play stealthy and this is nothing new. Is it the game’s fault? To some extent, for sure. Playing un-stealthily should be more punishing and harder to prevent this.
Matchmaking
The matchmaking is crossplay by default, but you’ll be able to switch it off in the options. Otherwise, I didn’t notice much of a matchmaking system in place. Finding a game is pretty fast overall but you can find yourself in a team with low levels playing against a level 3, 10, 42, and 24. This isn’t rare as of now and it sucks.
Yeah, all these problems could be solved by playing in a pre-made team with friends, but this is a big hurdle. Most people won’t have three friends playing the game. A game like this should have a good and fair matchmaking system in place. While this could be because I played at pre-release, I don’t have high hopes since these games tend to have bad matchmaking and EVERYONE on console and PC can play the game just as I do at pre-release.
Future Content
Let’s talk about the price. It’s €29.99 or your equivalent. Seems like a fair price if this was a complete experience and not have a Season Pass that was already announced and is almost as expensive as the base game and doesn’t offer much. The season pass is €19.99 but to be fair, according to the devs, this will just include cosmetics and everything else will be free.
For the next year (or how long the Year 1 season pass will last) they will release..one new game mode and one new character. Aside from that, they wrote “Major Gameplay Addition”, whatever that means, and a few free cosmetics.
This seems a bit low. Sure, it could be worse. They could force you to pay money for the new character, game mode, or map, but we all know the last two would be unplayable then since most of the player base doesn’t buy these. Also, just because something could be worse doesn’t make it good.
All of this lets the game feel shallow on content. Four characters and one game mode with four or five maps for €30 and over the next year, they’ll just add one of each. Pretty thin.
Performance
The performance is a bit bad on some systems it seems. I’m playing with an i7-7700K, 16GB Ram, and a GeForce GTX 1060, which is a bit above the recommended specs. They say, that you’ll get 60FPS with 1920×1080 on Ultra settings, but I didn’t. I have constant dips to 40-45, sometimes even around 30-35FPS. Loading times are also a bit long. It’s not unplayable but I can’t imagine people playing with minimum specs. There are also already many reports of people having significant problems with the performance on comparable PCs.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is fun even if you’re at a low skill level and don’t play stealthy. It can be frustrating to play against better players, just like in every multiplayer game, and the matchmaking will feel unfair, again just as in many other multiplayer games – but it still can be fun.
Conclusion
Is Hood: Outlaws & Legends worth €29.99? This really depends on you. I don’t think so. Free content is nice and all, but they’re too slow in releasing new content and there isn’t much there as of now. If you’re someone that puts hundreds of hours into a multiplayer game that’s fun to you, don’t expect a primarily stealth game, or have a pre-made team, this will be worth €29, for sure. I had fun playing the game when I did and probably will as well in the future, but I can’t recommend it to everyone.