Hood: Outlaws & Legends

» see hoodgame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Hood: Outlaws & Legends shipped on 10 May 2021, built by Sumo Newcastle and published by Focus Home Interactive. Two teams of four break into the same castle at the same time. You steal a key off the Sheriff of Nottingham and work out where the vault is, all of it while guards patrol and the other four players hunt you through the same corridors.

The structure was the good part. Three phases meant the match kept changing shape: quiet while you looked for the key, then loud and panicked the moment anyone was spotted, with a long haul at the end carrying the gold out on somebody's back. Each outlaw did one thing. Only Little John could open the locked gates, so losing him mid-heist meant finding another route rather than respawning and continuing. Maid Marion had a crossbow and smoke grenades, and Tooke had a flail. A team without a tank was a team solving a different puzzle.

Afterwards came the Scales of Justice, where you decided how much of the gold to keep and how much to give back to the people. Generosity bought perks and skills, which you then had to purchase with the gold you kept. A Robin Hood game that made redistribution a build decision is a sharper joke than most games of its budget attempt.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the name nobody said ~

Robin Hood is never named. That was deliberate. The team said the mystery of who was behind the hood was more interesting than settling it, so the game gives you Robin of Locksley and Robin the Earl of Huntingdon as competing legends and declines to pick. No location is named either and no period is fixed, which gave the level designers room to borrow from real castles like Dover and Bamburgh without owing anyone historical accuracy.

The villains got the better design language. The State, the authoritarian power you are robbing, was given Brutalist architecture in a medieval setting, concrete mass where you expect stone. Steven A. McKay, who writes the Forest Lord novels, wrote the lore. The Sheriff himself was modeled on the Tyrant from Resident Evil, an unkillable thing that walks toward you at a fixed speed while you try to finish what you came for.

~ the studio before this one ~

Sumo Newcastle used to be CCP Newcastle, the team behind EVE: Valkyrie, a space dogfighting game made for the first wave of consumer VR headsets. CCP Games sold the studio to Sumo Digital in January 2018 when it pulled back from virtual reality, and the staff who had spent years on cockpit combat were pointed at a third-person medieval heist game instead.

Hood was not their pitch. It started at Sumo Sheffield as an unmade idea for a co-operative dark Robin Hood game, and was rebuilt as player-versus-player-versus-environment because the Newcastle team's actual expertise was competitive multiplayer. Hunt: Showdown was the stated reference. You can see it in the bones: two squads after one objective, in an environment that punishes noise.

~ five months of notice ~

Reviews landed at mixed, which for a multiplayer-only game is a slower verdict than it sounds. There is no single-player campaign underneath it and no offline mode to preserve. The population thins and matchmaking takes longer, until the only people left are the ones who got very good at it and no new arrival can get a foothold.

Focus announced in September 2024 that the game would go offline, and gave it until 18 February 2025. Five months is unusually generous notice for a title this size. When the date came, every mode in the game needed other people and there was no longer anywhere to find them. hoodgame.com is now a HugeDomains listing, which is the registrar equivalent of a gravestone with the price on it.

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