And to be honest, that hype was earned, because Hunter IS that good. Again, while everyone tried to make shooters in the past ten years, very few people nailed it. Overwatch was the gold standard till recently, Apex Legends is great on consoles but sucked on mobile, Lawbreakers was underrated and died, Battleborn focused too much on PVE gameplay. The list literally goes on. Yet here was a game you could play on your phone that nails everything fun about the genre while being simple to get into but also hard to be an expert at.

Hunters’ gameplay is fast and frantic enough to for someone like a COD mobile fan to get into, while giving the level of tactics and strategic play very few games on mobile even offer in this genre. Like any good hero shooter, this is due to the balance between its characters, their classes and maps. The characters are split into 3 classes: damage, tanks and healers. This echoes the same key balances as Overwatch or Rivals and it’s nailed to perfect precision too. You have your typical characters like Imara Vex and Diago who fill your COD-style SMG soldier and sniper archetypes while the likes of Rieve , Kaos and Grozz fill more interesting roles. Rieve is basically just a straight Sith character lifted from the Battlefront or Star Wars: Jedi games where her speed, crazy mobility and ability to block bullets make her a hard character to pin down. This is balanced by her having one of the weakest health bars in the game however.

KA-0S and Grozz are both tanks but they go about the concept differently. The former is a K2SO-stly droid with giant shields on her hands, which she can use to block incoming fire while firing back, or just backhand or shield bash an enemy when the shields are running out. Grozz on the other hand is basically a brawler that looks like Chewbacca, with two giant clubs and a self-healing ability that helps you get in close and pummel whoever tries to oppose you.

This is all before getting into quirky characters that skirt the class boundaries as well. J3DI (yes I spelt that right) is a crazy droid who believes he’s a Jedi and despite being written as a damage character, is arguably the best tank in the game since he deflects bullets back to people who shot them. He can even “force pull” an enemy close to him by stretching his arms with a cable, while having no other ranged abilities as a balance as well. Charr on the other hand is a bit of a weird tank, where his overall health isn’t actually that high but he has an ability where each time you shoot him he heals . No Joke. Add in a pretty powerful shotgun and a strategy player can easily make him the most dangerous character in the game.

And in quirky characters like this is where Hunters shines best. You may notice characters like J3DI , Charr and KA-0S capture my eye more and that’s because they kind of represent the odd yet endearing character of the game. As a character they both seem like a joke at first, nut that joke quickly comes effectively dangerous and fun to play once you put your hands on it.

That’s Hunters as a whole. After all a lot of you might think this game couldn’t possibly be that good because it’s on a phone. And while those phone limitations do show, they’re actually used very well in making the game far more interesting. An easy example of this is how Hunters as a game lacks a lot of verticality in its maps. Don’t get me wrong a lot of it’s maps have multiple floors to play on and are designed with aspects like sniper outposts in mind. But Hunters doesn’t primarily have flying characters like Pharah in Overwatch or Iron Man in rivals, hence the maps are less vertical inclined. This keeps combat mostly ground oriented, but it brings in new aspects to consider about that ground combat when a level has a ledge to fall off of or a character that makes a small capture point harmful to enemies like Glukin or Skorra can.

And there still are characters like Pillbush or Nox which can flip that verticality rule on its head as well, while other aspects of the gameplay can come into focus as well like bullet types that can and can’t be deflected by jedi and sith characters.

These unique quirks then tie Hunters’ gameplay into its game modes, namely a team deathmatch mode, a dynamic and multiple control based capture mode, what’s essentially a crazier version of capture the flag, and a kill confirmed mode like the ones you find on Call of Duty. There are also specialist event modes but by far the best one is Huttball, which is essentially soccer but with shooting and weird Hunter abilities. The game’s beta had more typical escort missions but those haven’t existed for a while now. But trust me, like the rest of the modes in this game they were a blast.

So with everything I’ve said ,chances are you want to play Hunters right? After all the game seems awesome. And it is! In fact if the question is simply whether you should play hunters or not, the answer is a resounding yes. However you might have to do it ASAP, because by October this game likely won’t be here anymore.

Like many a live service hero shooter before it, Star Wars: Hunters unfortunately will be closing in October. The exact reason has never been given but most speculation points to the game not making as much money as Zynga and Disney wanted it to, with the latter especially likely disappointed by its financials. This is a gut punch to someone like me who’s played the game for almost two years now, but on some level it makes sense.

Hunters , like many other live service games is free-to-play but it was filled with multiple ways to make money through microtransactions. Heroes could be customized through costumes and weapon skins that all cost money on the game’s store. There was a battle pass system that would let you unlock new heroes faster, and of course there was the seasonal approach most live service games where in this case, a new hero/hunter and map would be unveiled every three months.

Hunters had the fundamentals right in this case as well. It even had a few moves of its own up its sleeve. For starters, despite starting on mobile, a Nintendo Switch edition of the game soon followed, making it the only alternative to Apex Legends on the platform until Overwatch 2 arrived. The game aimed to expand to PC, PS5/PS4 and Xbox as well but all this likely got cut even before the game was announced to be shutting down. These were all likely strategies to get the game more players and a larger fanbase, however it’s also what likely caused a lot of its costs to balloon and for Disney to decide the cost wasn’t worth it anymore.

And that counts because even at a mobile-console hybrid scale, live service games are essentially the biggest Hail Mary and double-edged sword moves in gaming at the moment. If they’re successful, they become the likes of a Destiny, Fortnite or again, Overwatch, where that one game makes so much money for a company it’s team can do whatever it wants and make any other games it wants as long as the live service keeps going. On the other hand if it isn’t a huge hit it becomes a financial pit that collectively drains the company and people developing it until we’re even lucky if the studio that made it even survives.

Not to hate, but how are they 6+ Marvel mobile games and you can’t keep Hunters alive?

This is the case Hunters was in, where it was likely mildly successful, but since it wasn’t the biggest shooter on mobile (you can blame COD mobile for that) and thus not making as much money as it could make, it by some metrics was probably considered a failure. The game’s situation likely  wasn’t helped by the  fact that Disney seemingly is making comparable if not more money from its far more popular yet cheaper to make Marvel games like Marvel Snap or old stalwarts like Marvel Future Fight. The former is basically a huge mobile game hit while the latter has lasts for over a decade while likely not costing the active development fees of a live service hero shooter like Hunters. The fact that all these other games are based on Marvel as compared to the less popular Star Wars doesn’t help either, as I’m near certain if Hunters were to just be reskinned as “Marvel Rivals Mobile” with the exact same characters turned to marvel counterparts, it would likely double in sales and player base.

All these facts make Hunters a sad story. As clearly there is something amazing to play here. Something you definitely should play today if you can, but something that seems like it was never meant to last, no matter how unique it was. It’s easy to lament over what the game should have done to survive too, from releasing earlier when Star Wars hype was stronger to maybe expanding to PC sooner (so we could at least have custom servers when it shuts down) or even not being so focused on other platforms and maybe increasing its budget for mobile advertising. It’s hard to tell what the answer could have been here (despite Disney not being cheap of course), but it says a lot about the state of gaming today when something this special can’t even earn the right to stay alive.

Either way, if you can, please do try the game out, we’re near certain you’ll love it . After all, right now all the characters, costumes and upgrades are pretty much unlocked for people to play it, while the ranked mode has become a crazy mad dash to the top to see who maintains it when the game ends. It’s still one of my favorite games to play, and something tells me if you try it, it might become yours too.

See you out there. And somebody please save this game.