Hood: Outlaws & Legends is the brand new PvPvE multiplayer heist game from Focus Home Interactive and Sumo Digital. I hate comparing games to other games in my reviews but if you’re asking yourself what a PvPvE multiplayer heist is think For Honour meets Payday with a touch of Dead by Daylight thrown in for good measure. Now, these are all good games but unfortunately Hood: Outlaws & Legends sadly is not.
Gameplay
On the surface Hood: Outlaws & legends has a simple setup. You join a team of 4 characters and have a simple objective to steal the chest full of gold from the castle and successfully extract it from the map. The main objective is broken down into simple steps. Pickpocket the vault key from the sheriff. Use the key to open the vault door. Carry the chest to an extraction point on the map and then which the chest onto a waiting boat. The twist to Hood: Outlaws & legends is that while your band of merry men are pursuing these objectives there is another band of outlaws trying to do exactly the same.
Do you go for stealth and a well-planned and executed heist? Or do you go in hammers swinging and use brute force? Success does hinge solely on how well you play as a team. A stealthy well-cordinated start to the heist can give you an amazing head start on the opposition. Working together to silently execute AI guards. clearing a path into the castle without alerting the garrison can lead to you obtaining the vault key extremely quickly. If your opposition has gone for a full-on attack this can easily lead to you having the vault open and carrying the chest to an extraction point before they have even made it into the castle.
Sounds easy right? Try doing that on a game full of random online players! You suddenly realise no one cares about teamwork and just leg it in multiple directions, do their own thing, and get mad at you for not being psychic and supporting them. Oh yeah, no one. I mean absolutely no one uses the in-game chat in Hood: Outlaw & legends so expect zero communication as you endeavor on this team-based game.
Combat in Hood: Outlaws & Legends feels fundamentally flawed. Each character has their own weapons and abilities. On paper, this is well balanced as characters have advantages over one type but disadvantages on another. Using a team consisting of each character utilising individual skills and teamwork should make a team difficult to beat.
The reality is as soon as you come across other players combat becomes a chaotic mess of swinging hammers and flails while the ranger and thief run away. It feels like they came up with a wonderful idea for a game, created well-balanced characters, and just forgot to implement any of that into the actual gameplay.
Graphics
In the interest of fairness, I played Hood: Outlaw & Legends on both PS4 and PS5 for this review ( The digital purchase includes both PS4 and PS5 versions as standard). The PS5 version of Hood: Outlaws and Legends are stunning. Graphically it is beautiful in places but there is a massive comparison between the two generations. This is more noticeable when you are in your Hideout in between matches. On the PS5 there is beautifying dappling sunlight cascading through the forest canopy onto the tree trunks around your camp. On the PS4 this same scene looks like someone threw white emulsion on a tree.
To be fair, when playing an actual heist there doesn’t seem to be much difference between PS4 and Ps5 graphically but this probably has more to do with the fact every map takes place in the dark so probably hides a lot of sins.
Final Thoughts
When I first saw the trailer for Hood: Outlaws & Legends I was genuinely interested. This seemed like a fun and enjoyable game that I could spend many an hour online with the lads having fun. That fun didn’t last more than two hours.
Don’t get me wrong we had some great laughs, working as a team and winning a heist without ever been spotted. Nearly losing a game until we taunted the sheriff (who can’t be killed) into the extraction area to wipe out the opposition team. Having a truly awful online game when we had to matchmake with two random players and only winching the chest for the last 2 seconds and getting the win (if that had been the other way round I would be raging)
Hood: Outlaws & Legends has the making of a great game in there but unfortunately it is littered with flaws. The ideas are not implemented fully, Matchmaking takes forever, The only way to really play the game is if you have three friends who also own it.
At £24.99 for the standard edition, Hood: Outlaws & legends is reasonably priced but personally I would say hold on to your hard-earned cash. I expect Hood: Outlaws & Legends to appear on Psplus extremely soon.
Overall Score – 6/10
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