Predator: Hunting Grounds will launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 1, a week from now. Three versions of the game will be available for purchase, including a standard edition, a Jungle Edition that will also feature four additional Predators with unique equipment, and a Yautja Edition, which will also include all DLC for the title.

A physical edition of the game will also release for PS5 on November 12, with pre-orders for the same set to kick off tomorrow, on September 24. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like Xbox players will the option to purchase the game physically.

In a press release, IllFonic CEO Charles Brungardt said, “This game has a strong, enthusiastic player base and a vocal community that wants to see the game updated and supported. Now that IllFonic is publishing games, we knew we had to get Predator: Hunting Grounds back. We knew we needed to get back to the Chopper!”

Before its launch for current-gen consoles, Patch 2.49 will go live in April for PS4 and PC. It will include a rework and balance changes for fireteam weapons and the Predator’s weapons, alongside improvements for the UX and playability. Player movement is also getting some changes.

After its release for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, with Standard and Digital Deluxe Editions offered, IllFonic will add new Predators this Winter and in Spring 2025. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about improvements to the current-gen versions sooner than later. Stay tuned for updates, and check out our review for Predator: Hunting Grounds here.

PREDATOR: HUNTING GROUNDS

Illfonic’s asymmetrical multiplayer title Predator: Hunting Grounds was a flawed game in more ways than one, but for fans of the property, there was some fun to be had in getting to play as a Predator. With multiple different Predator types to play as and unique abilities to make use of with each of them, the game certainly had some interesting mechanics up its sleeve- even though not all of them were as well executed as they should have been.

SYNDICATE (2012)

In 2012, EA and Starbreeze teamed up for a revival of the Syndicate series, only instead of making a real-time tactics game like the originals, they made a first person shooter. It was drastic shift, of course, and 2012’s Syndicate doesn’t ever match the heights of its predecessors- but it’s still a fun ride. It looked really good for its time and brought its cyberpunk setting to life really well, and there was a lot of fun to be had in its combat encounters.

Overcooked is the quintessential party game series and Overcooked: All You Can Eat! includes pretty much everything. Both games along with their DLC are included and remastered, providing hundreds of different levels to co-op in, both locally and online. Hitman 2 is the follow-up to Hitman (2016), providing more sandboxes for Agent 47 to assassinate his targets along with new modes, the new Sniper Assassin mode and much more.

As for Predator: Hunting Grounds, it’s an asymmetrical multiplayer shooter from IllFonic, the team behind Friday the 13th: The Game. It sees four players, armed to the teeth with military weapons, completing objectives while being stalked by the Predator. Despite a rough launch, it’s received a number of updates and improvements overtime.

Despite its rough start, IllFonic continues to support Predator: Hunting Grounds, announcing new content that’s out now. The first is the Valkyrie Predator, a Predator that takes after Viking Raiders and uses a two-handed Norse hammer as her weapon. She’ll be included in upcoming paid DLC while the hammer will be available early for those who pre-order.

Custom Private Mode is also coming for Clash and Hunt, allowing players to tweak matches in any way they see fit. Modifying the HUD, Predator, weapons/gear and gameplay in general are all possible. You can even choose modes like Big Head mode, The Floor is Lava (where the Predator cannot touch the ground) and much more.

Experience conferred is only 25 percent of regular matches but those who play Hardcore Hunt will receive full experience, though it’s a far more realistic mode with reduced health, minimal HUD and so on. More updates and DLC are also in the works so stay tuned for more details.

Predator: Hunting Grounds is currently available for PS4 and PC. Check out our review for the base game here.

While there were some issues with the game at launch, particularly in the content area, Predator: Hunting Grounds has been a solid effort at capturing the classic horror-action series in the style of the original movie (you can check out our full review through here). But it’s about to get even more original, as the man who arguably put the franchise on the map will be coming to take vengeance on some Predator hunters at the end of the month.

It was announced via the PlayStation blog that the game would be adding the character of Dutch from the 1987 original. He was the protagonist of that film and found himself and his squad of soldiers being hunted by the first version of the deadly Predator. He was played by the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will return to the role here with both his likeness and voice.

To play as Dutch you will need to pay up, but there are free parts of the update. While purchasing Dutch will get you early access to them, the QR5 “Hammerhead” Rifle and Dutch’s Knife will also be free to get for all players. There will also be tapes of Dutch that recount what happened after the events of the 1987 film.

Predator: Hunting Grounds is available now on PlayStation 4 and PC. Dutch and the rest of the update will launch on May 26th. He’ll be the first of a DLC roadmap that’s been revealed, which you can see below.

Mud Camouflage

The Predator has thermal vision, which renders attempts to blend into the foliage around you to hide from his gaze pretty much null. Thankfully, you can take a page straight from Arnold’s book in the original film. If you look down at the ground and press the interact button on your controller, you can cover yourself in mud. You’re vulnerable while you do so, and the mud doesn’t last forever, but while applied it masks you from the Predator’s thermal vision; which is invaluable thing to do for your survival.

Listen to the Trees

Unlike the soldiers, the Predator has loads of tools at his disposal to avoid detection. His nimble speed, agility, and altitude make him hard to pin down, to say nothing of the fact that he can turn invisible. Thankfully, not even the Predator is without a giveaway. When the Predator is running through the trees above you, keep an eye out for falling leaves and branches. This is a dead giveaway that the Predator is above you, and that he’s close.

Watch Your Radar

Your radar is an important tool for your survival in Predator: Hunting Grounds. It can be used to quickly locate your allies, enemies, and objectives. But even more than that, it can also be used to spot useful elements in your environment, such as health packs and ammunition crates, as well as optional pickups that provide you with the in-game currency used to purchase cosmetics.

Spot Your Target

Keeping track of the Predator can be a challenge in and of itself, what with his high mobility and altitude, plus his ability to turn invisible. That’s why it’s important to take advantage of the spot feature, which can be activated by pressing Up on the directional pad. This will highlight the Predator for a short time on your screen and the rest of your fireteam’s screens as well, helping to give you a fighting chance against your hunter.

Mimicry

Of course, if everyone knows about this, then hunting the fireteam down as the Predator becomes a lot harder. Thankfully, the Predator has a few extra tricks up his own sleeve as well. Pressing Up on the directional pad as the Predator opens up a dialog wheel which allows you to mimic the Fireteam players, playing a handful of dialog lines that sound just like them. This is a great way to lure the players into a region where they think they’re safe, allowing you to pounce in for the kill.

Stick Together

As a Fireteam member, there are few more surefire ways to put yourself in danger than getting separated from the rest of your squad. On your own, you simply do not have the firepower or survivability to deal with the Predator. Getting separated makes you much more vulnerable to threats of all kind, from enemy AI soldiers to the Predator player. It’s always best to try and make sure there’s at least one ally nearby.

Utilize Distractions

As the Predator, one of your biggest assets is simply the mission the fireteam is assigned to complete. Take advantage of their divided focus. While they are dealing with enemy soldiers or completing objectives, utilize the fact that their attention is elsewhere to your advantage.

Stuck in One Place

Along those same lines, take advantage of the nature of some of the specific objectives as the Predator. For example, any of the objectives that require the fireteam to upload or hack something require the player that initiated the objective to stay within a certain distance from it. This can make for an easy target to pick off if the rest of the players get distracted by something else.

Watch Your Energy

As the Predator, nearly all of your abilities are tied to an energy meter, which drains as you use them. This includes your active camo, thermal vision, and your target isolator view. These are all essential tools in your arsenal, which means that good energy management is essential to success.

Hunting Over Survival

An important thing to note as the Predator is that your ultimate goal, unlike the fireteam players, isn’t actually to survive yourself; it’s to make sure that they don’t. As long as you kill the four fireteam players, the match counts as a victory for the Predator. As such, when you are finally downed as the Predator, you have the option to activate a self-destruct function in your armor, which will explode after a short period of time and kill any players caught in the radius. It’s a last ditch tool, for sure, but it can be a way to turn a defeat into a victory.

You Can’t Hurt Your Friends

By the nature of the game, the fireteam players are going to spend a lot of time firing at a target who’s location they aren’t entirely sure of. Inevitably this means that allies will sometimes get caught in your crossfire. Thankfully, the developers thought ahead about this likelihood, and as such, friendly fire is disabled in the game. So don’t worry about spraying downrange with your friends in the way; you can’t hurt them even if you wanted to.

The Perks of Having Good Perks

Part of character customization is selecting a combination of up to three different perks for your loadout. There’s a large list of available options, and careful selection of your perks is critical to optimizing your loadout and giving yourself the best chances of survival. Some of them are straightforward and universal, like increased health or ammo reserves. Others can be more situational, or can combine with others to make a greatly synergized build.

Always Take the Shot

In Predator: Hunting Grounds, nearly everything you do, from completing objectives to hitting enemy targets, earns you experience points towards your next level up, and the unlocks that come with it. So even if hitting the target looks like a longshot, go for it whenever possible. More experience points means more unlocks and more variety and versatility in your loadouts.

Cover Is Important

Enemies, both AI and the Predator player, can’t shoot through cover in Predator: Hunting Grounds. This makes good cover an invaluable asset to your survival as a fireteam player, and it should always be prioritized and taken advantage of whenever it’s available. That piece of wood or burned out car can make the difference between survival and defeat.

Get To The Chopper

When in doubt, if you’re having a bad hunt as the Predator, waiting for the players at their extraction point can be a good way to finish them off. They all have to group up there to escape, and hordes of AI enemies always flood the area while the players await their escape, providing you on final opportunity to sneak in and take them out.

Predator: Hunting Ground is a game built around moments of tension like this. An asymmetrical multiplayer shooter, the game splits lobbies of five players into two groups; four soldiers and one Predator, in a fight for survival in dense jungle environments. The game is a little rough around the edges at times, but Predator: Hunting Grounds ultimately offers a remarkably enjoyable multiplayer experience.

The game offers a brief tutorial, though only for the Predator. It’s…okay, introducing you to the basics of gameplay as the Predator, though it does leave out a couple of key mechanics, mostly a Target Isolation scanner which is essential to your hunt; we’ll talk more about that later, though. While the tutorial is a little lacking, gameplay as the Predator is actually a lot of fun, and impressively fluid and easy to control.

"The real fun of playing as the Predator, though, is the fluid movement controls, called Predkour in a groan inducing combination of the words predator and parkour."

The Predator is controlled from a third-person perspective, unlike the first-person soldiers, and is all about mobility and using your superior endurance and tools in smart and effective ways. You can turn yourself temporarily invisible, activate the Predator’s classic thermal vision, and activate the aforementioned target isolation scanner, which highlights the general location of the target players while in thermal vision.

The real fun of playing as the Predator, though, is the fluid movement controls, called Predkour in a groan inducing combination of the words predator and parkour. The mechanics are anything but groan inducing, however. Everything with your movement is tied to the X button, which allows you to climb trees and hop between different elevations, across the branches, and move from tree to tree. The whole thing is pretty easy to pick up, and very solid in its implementation; I rarely had the game send me in a direction I didn’t intend during parkour. The predator also has a powerful leap option, allowing you to jump great distances, which can be leveraged into a pretty powerful area-of-effect ground slam attack.

Despite this arsenal of tools at your disposal, however, playing as the Predator is actually pretty challenging. There’s the obvious fact that you’re alone against a squad of four other players, who know you’re out there, somewhere. But there’s also the mechanics themselves; most of your abilities, from your thermal vision to your ground slam, are tied to an energy meter that drains with every use of an ability.

It recharges, but fairly slowly. This requires you to be smart, no only in your approach against the other players, but also your approach to using your abilities. It’s certainly the most challenging part of the game, but that makes it the most rewarding as well. When everything finally clicks, and you get that perfect stealth kill, or finally wipe the enemy team for the very first time, it’s an incredibly satisfying feeling.

"The end result of this is a multiplayer experience that, despite looking fairly limited given its lack of other modes, is actually a refreshingly enjoyable experience."

Playing as the Predator is a blast, but impressively, so is playing as the soldiers. As a human, you are dropped on the map as part of a squad of four, and are actually given a full mission to accomplish, complete with AI soldiers that must be fought as part of the process. Each map has a different objective, and while they’re all variations on the same theme (such as hacking into a terminal and placing transponders to spy on enemy traffic), there’s enough variety in them to keep the maps, which admittedly all look and otherwise feel pretty similar, from getting stale.

And throughout your mission, the Predator player is out there, stalking you. It’s a nice twist on these kinds of asymmetrical games, which often have no other objective for the hunted players than simple survival. Here, you actually have a task to complete, with multiple objectives and plenty of enemies to fight. Victory doesn’t just come from outlasting the clock or killing the Predator; it can also come from actually completing your mission and successfully extracting. This serves to mix up matches really well, as even the same map can play out wildly differently based on how you approach the objective and which type of victory your team ultimately ends up chasing.

The end result of this is a multiplayer experience that, despite looking fairly limited given its lack of other modes, is actually a refreshingly enjoyable experience. I played dozens of matches as both Predator and as a soldier, and never once found myself feeling bored, or like I was repeating myself. The game capitalizes on the obvious fact that different players will take different approaches, and then cleverly supports that with a few key choices to add further variety, to create an experience with surprising longevity.

"Predator: Hunting Grounds is a lot of fun to play, and well worth the investment for those looking for an enjoyable, sometimes even a little nerve-wracking, multiplayer shooter."

The game certainly isn’t without its flaws, of course. The progression system is adequate, offering a decent selection of perks, equipment, and cosmetics that can be unlocked for both the Predator and soldiers through a combination levelling and an in-game currency (which thankfully isn’t too hard to acquire).

These are fine, and do add a bit of incentive if there is a particular item you want to grind for. In my experience, though, there just isn’t enough differentiation, particularly in the weapon unlocks; unless a gun is noticeably better than the rest of the options, which a couple of them are, unlocked weapons don’t feel drastically different than the starter ones. There are a couple of perks and items that also feel distinctly over or underpowered. Thankfully, they don’t really effect the balance of actual gameplay too much, but it is something worth mentioning.

Overall, Predator: Hunting Grounds is an unexpected success, one that puts a couple of fun twists on the asymmetrical shooter genre to create a game that’s an absolute blast to play. Crossplay opens up the player base immensely, and makes it easy to find a populated match; load times are a bit slow as of release, though the developers are aware of the problem, and things had improved by the end of my review.

Between solid controls, clever and enjoyable gameplay, and a plethora of things to earn for both character, there’s no shortage of entertainment to be had from this game. The game is only online; there’s no offline option of any kind, not even for private matches, so if you’re on Playstation and don’t have PS Plus, you’re out of luck. But otherwise, Predator: Hunting Grounds is a lot of fun to play, and well worth the investment for those looking for an enjoyable, sometimes even a little nerve-wracking, multiplayer shooter.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Tomorrow we will get the official launch of Predator: Hunting Grounds. The 4v1 multiplayer will see you either put in the shoes of the powerful and iconic Predator or a group of soliders trying to survive against the beast. You can check out the blood-soaked launch trailer through here. It also will have a very hefty day one update.

Those who have the game for review have confirmed that it will have a 10 GB update you will need to download. Since the game is multiplayer only, it means you’ll have to download that if you happen to be getting a physical copy on the PS4. It’s definitely a big one, especially since the game itself is relatively small. As of now, there’s no notes available for what the patch addresses

Predator: Hunting Grounds will launch April 24th for PlayStation 4 and PC (via the Epic Games Store). You can check out a wiki that’s all about the game through here.