Hood: Outlaws & Legends
Developer Sumo Digital
Publisher Focus Home Interactive
Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
The guard turns without warning, suddenly breaking the patrol route that would have put his back to us. Robin can’t have been spotted, surely – we’ve got him safely ensconced within one of the fort’s many convenient bushes. And yet, some quirk of the AI seems to have given this guard second sight, able to spot what should be hidden. He turns again and goes the way he was originally headed. False alarm.
We’re on Robin’s side here, naturally, but playing Hood: Outlaws & Legends often leaves us feeling a kinship with this poor, doomed guard. Peering into the gloom, unable to shake the sense that there’s something hiding just out of sight: in our case, some stronger incarnation of the game which shows its face only occasionally, before ducking back into the brambles of the one we’re actually playing.
We catch our first glimpse of it in the tutorial, a deft introduction to the game’s finest concepts. It walks you through a scripted version of a heist, introducing its cast one by one. It begins, of course, with Robin, who has traded in his tights for the Middle Ages equivalent of a ghillie suit. He’s the sniper, vulnerable up close but able to put an arrow through a skull from halfway across the map, and armed with special abilities that amount to, essentially, a flashbang and rocket-propelled grenade.