Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Release Date: 10th May 2021
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Steam and Epic Games Store.
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
▫️ A review code was kindly provided by the publisher.
We all know the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. You know, take from the rich and give to the poor. Developer Sumo Digital has teamed up with Focus Home Interactive to bring us Hood: Outlaws & Legends, a team-based PvPvE multiplayer-only action game, where you definitely take from the rich… but maybe you keep the gold for yourself. Let’s see what’s under the hood.
The Setup
The premise for Hood: Outlaws & Legends is fairly simple. Two teams are competing to locate and extract a chest full of gold. The process is always the same; find the Sheriff, steal his key, make your way to the vault, steal the chest, get it to one of the extraction points and get ready to fight for your life.
Each team consists of four players, and all players are free to choose between the four different characters, even letting your entire team pick the same one, if they so desire. Robin is the archer (of course) and is great at dealing with enemies from afar. Marianne is a hunter and is the ultimate assassin, able to go invisible to take out her foes. Tooke is the team healer equipped with a devastating flail, and John is the all-out brawler, equipped with a massive hammer that can often one-shot opponents.
Once you’ve assembled your team any way you see fit, your character choice is locked in for the mission. Each character has certain unique actions they can take during a match, like John being able to hold open gates, Robin and Marianne being able to create new shortcuts with their ranged weapons, and Tooke, well, being able to help keep the team alive. It is entirely possible to forego any character, however, as the maps allow you to traverse in a number of ways regardless of your setup.
The Heist
Each team starts at their respective base and then has to make their way across the map, ideally without alerting guards (yes, this is what the E in PvPvE refers to). If a guard spots you, not only will they alert other guards in the area, but more crucially, it will alert the enemy team of your position, as well as highlight the spotted player(s) in red for everyone to see. In a game all about stealing a chest before the enemy team, stealth can be quite important – unless you prefer to try your luck at brute-forcing the entire thing, which is also possible. Difficult, but possible.
When a team locates the Sheriff, who always holds the key, they have to steal it from him. His location is random each match, as is the location of the vault that the treasure is kept in. Once you have the key in your possession, your team can see which building the vault is in, like the Church or the Keep, among other places. Only the player actually holding the key, however, can see exactly where in the building the vault is – like 2 floors down in the storeroom, for instance. This means that, ideally, you will be communicating with your team so they know where to go, though unfortunately the default “communication” menu only really lets you tell people to attack, defend or come to you.
There’s also a “ping” system, letting you mark something for your team to see, but sadly it doesn’t prioritise enemies or objects over regular waymarkers, which often means that trying to highlight a certain enemy may require you to “ping” a dozen times, before it finally selects the thing you want.
Once you have located the vault, you have to grab the chest and carry it to one of the extraction zones. Picking the right location can be paramount to your success, as you want to account for its relative distance to your base, so you can get back into the action as quickly as possible, if (and definitely when) you inevitably get taken out. Carrying the chest leaves you defenseless until you drop it, but dropping the chest will mark it on the map for everyone to see – including the opposing team. If you’re trying to get a headstart on the extraction, you want to remain as stealthy as you can, so the enemies don’t know where you are or where you may be going.
This is where picking certain characters really comes in handy. John is stronger than everyone else, which allows him to walk the fastest while carrying the chest. If you only have a single John on your team, however, you either need to find paths without closed gates, or risk dropping the chest so that John can open the way forward, while someone else carries it through. John is also able to actually extract the chest faster than anyone else, as he can use his stamina to speed up the process. The flip side to using John for all these things, however, is that if he’s carrying or extracting the chest, he isn’t fighting – and he is by far the most capable and deadly melee fighter of the bunch. Speeding up the extraction using his stamina also means that if he needs to defend himself, he simply can’t.
Alright, so we’ve established that John is pretty versatile, but what about the other characters? Robin’s explosive arrows can take out multiple enemies at once, which is handy both when attacking or defending. Marianne excels at assassinations due to her invisibility, though what makes her incredibly useful when extracting is her smoke bombs, that not only obscures the players currently extracting by making them harder to see (and thus kill), but also allows her to assassinate from any direction, instead of only from behind. Finally, Tooke is great at keeping the team alive (even if his ability cooldown is very long), while also being a very capable melee fighter with gas grenades, that completely deplete stamina – which is very handy if you want to leave your enemies unable to fight back.
There are more nuances to when and how you can and should use each character, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.
The Payout
As I mentioned at top, hood is all about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. This very concept is front and center at the end of each match, as any gold you earn from making progress extracting the chest can be either given to the people, which upgrades your Hideout, or added to your Purse, which lets you spend it on perks and cosmetic clothes and weapons. It will default to splitting the money equally, but your focus is entirely up to you – at least until your Hideout hits its max level, after which you automatically pocket everything.
As your Hideout levels up, it unfortunately won’t have any visible upgrades, but higher levels do give access to certain cosmetic items that you can purchase with in-game gold. And no, there is no way to spend real money in this game – at least at the time of writing.
Your overall character profile as well as each individual character also level up based on exp. earned from each match, which on top of unlocking additional cosmetic items, unlocks equippable perks for each character. These perks include things like extra exp. earned from assassinations, higher heavy attack damage at the cost of stamina, or being impervious to your own gas grenades. Each character has their own unique perks, and some can change your gameplay focus a fair bit.
Finally, as you accumulate wins with each of the four characters, you will unlock more and more of their backstory. Once you win 35 times with any given one, you will be treated to a fully voiced 5-10 minute semi-animated backstory called their “Legend”. There is also one for winning in general, regardless of character used, and this one will tell you about your archnemesis, the Sheriff. All in all it’s a pretty cool reward for investing time with each hero.
The Problems
I briefly talked about how the “ping” system isn’t great, but unfortunately that isn’t the only problem here. While the game in general is quite fun, it doesn’t take particularly long before every match starts to feel the same. Your teammates and opponents will always add some unexpected twists, of course, but with a selection of only five maps and a randomness to key and vault locations that isn’t actually all that random, it all becomes routine after a while. The five maps also aren’t that different from each other, really, and if it wasn’t for a collectible tracker showing five maps in the Hideout, I would probably have told you the game featured fewer than that.
Another issue is the combat, which at times can feel incredibly unbalanced for several reasons. Firstly, gameplay will very often force you into close combat encounters, which puts your non-melee characters at a massive disadvantage. Especially if the enemy team has multiple Johns or Tookes, you may struggle in most encounters. The extractions also usually end up in massive all-out brawls, where the sheer brute force of someone like John can make or break the match.
Secondly, and this is even more frustrating, anyone can assassinate anyone at pretty much any time, provided they’re able to crouch behind them. You will very often be engaged in combat with someone, only for them to start crouching in a circle around you, spamming the square button, waiting for that cheap instant-kill to take you out. It feels broken and wrong that you can be assassinated like that by someone who you were clashing weapons with seconds prior.
A great thing about this game is the optional cross-play (between PC and any given family of consoles), though unfortunately the matchmaking is less great. It will frequently pit four low level players against four high level players, and even when it doesn’t, there are some huge inconsistencies in how long it can take to fill a lobby. I’ve had multiple instances of waiting more than 10 minutes to get the 8th and final player to join, so the match can begin – as even when everyone hits Ready, the match never begins until it’s 4 vs. 4.
There’s also some weirdness where the game will not let you invite your friends if they’re already in a lobby, and frequent issues where accepting an invite simply fails for no apparent reason. I also experienced several disconnects, countless issues where the game would disband my party and put me back to the Hideout, and even a couple of game crashes. If you’re playing on PS4, the crashing seems to be even more frequent. Hopefully the worst of these issues will be resolved in the coming weeks – including a few trophies that unfortunately are a bit buggy too.
The Verdict
I’ve put almost 50 hours into Hood: Outlaws & Legends and overall, it’s actually been a lot of fun. That’s why it’s such a shame that the game has so many issues, some of which can and most likely will get patched, and others that are core to the game design and thus are less likely to be changed, at least in the short term.
The developers do appear to have plenty of content and events planned for the game, however, so I imagine the experience will get better over time – and despite its problems, I’m not quite done lining my pockets just yet either.
-K.A. Pedersen