hunters arena legends is a game you probably never would have noticed or thought much of, most people didn't, it launched free on PS plus to little fanfare and died fairly quickly, even its servers are shutting down very soon this month and you'll be lucky to get a game going at all, no matter a full one, I couldn't manage to get a full game going and this is the one time post launch you might get close to one, but I couldn't get more than 4 people in a game. this will be a combination of my thoughts on the game as it is now and how I felt playing it at launch, because I did play a ton of this at launch and I did really enjoy it, the game was super fun and had a lot of potential.

the way the game works is it's a hack and slash battle royale, the combat is in the vein of a game like DMC or bujingai or nier automata, lock ons and combo strings (though sadly each character only gets 2 each) and you also have some cooldowns like games like granblue relink or that one TMNT game platinum did that people get mad over it having cooldowns. it all reminds me a lot of another personal favourite of mine, my hero academia: ultra rumble, a similar battle royale that I've sunk hundreds of hours in and am pretty high up on the competitive leaderboards for, it has that structure of finding loot and leveling up, healing and getting into skermishes as the map gets smaller, where its different to that game is that it has enemies around the map you can kill for XP inbetween fights and finding chests and they have different levels so you have to be careful who you kill until you feel confidant enough in your gear to get those higher XP enemies and bosses that can spawn close to the middle of the map. it's a fun loop, spawning and hunting for gear until you run into another hunter and fight to the win and there's enough depth with the combat with your cooldowns and your combos, the martial arts moves that are slower but more powerful and your weapon that's faster but less damaging and you have things like dodges and even a burst that gets you out of combos, plus an umtimate for when you're really struggling. it's a lot of fun and there's so much verity with the nearly 20 characters that it never really feels all that stale since the people you face will usually play super differently and you can switch up characters super often if you get bored of who you're maining, though support ended fast enough that you didn't see too many dlc characters and the grind to get them seemed very excessive.

the cast is super varied and fun to play, at least in playstyle, the cast can kind of blend in design wise but there are still some standouts even in there, the panda, the cool black monk with the healing powers, some journey to the west characters, a robot? and a scythe girl, but many do just fill that "Chinese historical figure" template ala dynasty warriors designs, they work though and I assume they're all historical or literary figures, since there's those journey to the west characters in here and it has legends in the title, but maybe i'm wrong. my favourites to play were the scythe girl dalgi who gets some ranged dark magic abilities, a cute long haired guy with a ghost stand and some huge ranged sword attacks, his name is yoongeon, he even has a turret mode weirdly, a first for an action game I think. the robot girl dara was very fun but her cooldowns weren't great, sun wukong is a highlight since he has some really fun extendable staff attacks, even the genericy main guy jun is really cool since he has a whip chain-sword and some very good cooldowns and the panda is another highlight, he's just a cool panda and he does some of the highest damage in the game, the sitar girl ara too is so cool, she has some cool ranged attacks and can lay music based landmines behind her, she even has some melee attacks using her cloth that remind me a lot of Maria Kyōgoku from sengoku basara and reminding me of sengoku basara is the highest complement any action game can get. there's mir who's a barbarian who wields 2 huge clubs and has some absurdly high damage with his cooldowns, he isn't even all that slow like you would expect and is one of the better characters for newcomers, the panda tau also is cool, attacks with his claws and is on the slower end, but he's a panda so I mained him anyway. aiden is another cool one, he has summonable shields that remind me a lot of secret genshin best boy contender thoma, he has a spear and summons these shields that can block off enemies and damage them when summoned, it's a strange playstyle but its really fun and I feel like he'd be super good in the teams mode.

though some characters I really wasn't into like the monkey with the axe, whos name i had to look up but apparently is gyeonjo, who was just far too slow and his shield cooldowns weren't great, the chakrams character mimi is also super underpowered and her cooldowns are really bad, the fan wielder dlc character momo is basically just her but better since she can spam her ranged fans and she has some summonable blades for her cooldowns that work similar to how the chakram characters cooldowns work. there's an ice spear character who had the potential to be fun with her stuns and the fact her spear has a really fun combo to it, but because of the lag the game pretty much always had, landing her attacks was the most difficult out of the cast and it made her very hard to play. mumyang also I wasn't super into, he has his dagger and he's the main speedy character In the cast, he makes use of a double in combat and he seemed to be the most popular one I saw being played this close to shutdown, but I could just not get the hang of him. the drunkard geonhong is one of the most unique members of the cast with his animations swaying wildly and some very cool fire attacks, he even has a ranged you can aim which is a rarity here but his melee attacks are just not super fun to use with his weird weighted stick and alcohol attacks, but he's cool enough I can see people maining him for the unique playstyle. samjang the monk has one of the best aesthetic designs, a monk with an afro and a mace, but he is heavy focused on support and healing so using him in the modes I played mainly was very difficult since I never had teammates to help out, but he seems very good for that and I imagine he's the best support in the game, his fire fist attacks are also very cool. pigsy also i wasn't super into, he was just hard to use with his grapples and his jumping attacks that were very hard to aim, but the rake weapon was very cool.

the game is super laggy though, even at launch and it was a problem that only seemed to get worse over time as the servers started not being maintained, if they ever were to begin with, and it makes some of those characters hard to play, it doesn't run well either even on ps5, the solo training mode also feels super stiff, not enough to ruin the game for me, the low frame rate doesn't bother me at all but the lag in matches is annoying. the game doesn't look good enough for it to be a console issue either, it looks great but it's not demanding, the characters are well designed, if sometimes a little generic, but they're very high detail and the animations are really good, but again none of this should really make the game lag like crazy, it's so strange, when something like ultra rumble both looks far better and has crazier effects but also doesn't lag like crazy in matches. the levels are nice though, there was only 2 in the main mode but both had some varied zones, like castles and forests and lava zones and mountainy areas, i preffered always sticking to the castles since the layouts felt the easiest to remember and they often had the best loot in them. the different modes do offer some varity but they are all different flavours of PVP, some with teammates, a tag mode and an objective based mode called conquest, but the basic solos always fitted me best and there's no solo modes to speak of beyond a training mode with a very basic ai dummy. there's no real story and lore is seemingly non-existant, i couldn't tell you much about anyone beyond what their gameplay convays and even then some still are just kind of walking designs, the game does have a dub though, it's on the same level as a Shenmue with some very funny line deliveries and i like it, it adds to the cheesy vibe the game already has with the panda murdering people and the afro monk.

the game was made by a studio, mantisco limited, who are really only credited on this, it's their only game and there aren't any real credits to speak of, even for the music which is solid if unmemorable and almost entirely absent in matches, the game is a mystery to me really, it's on pc as well as ps and hopefully that versions servers last longer than they did for playstation 4 and 5, i assume more active too since again i could not get too many people playing this now. no physical copies and i'm not even sure there's a way to buy it now, i got it on PS plus so i never even knew how much it cost, probably not worth it now that its dying anyway, as much as i do like the game. if it did have some offline modes i might have kept it installed, maybe even buy some of the games overpriced microtransactions, which were admittedly pretty good, some of those costumes are great, but as is i can't recommend it to anyone beyond watching some gameplay as a curiosity.