Foreword.

As a preface, I wanna say that I like hunting games and I know a thing or two about hunting IRL. I've spent a sizable amount of time in COTW and hunted a lot in RDR 2. I'll be honest, I bought this game for the sole reason of having SAKO and Beretta firearms which I'm a huge fan of. The screenshots seemed decent, and the dreaded IGN review painted a pretty picture. There's a little bit of paid videos of the game on YouTube by a couple of somewhat popular content creators, if given time you'll get a good look at the game and it's mechanics. But what I wanna get into is...

The Devil is in the detail.

Long story short, it's just plain lazy. The environments are large enough but they lack variety. While in COTW you'll come across landmarks and unique locations which are memorable and interesting this game offers you the bare minimum. Here's a mountain forest with a river and a few lakes, here's a meadow with some ponds, etc. It's as unimaginative and uninspired as possible. The weather system is really weird. There's a precise "forecast" for each biome and if it rains there, it'll rain for the whole time you stay there. Day/night cycle is absent.

The weapons are a big disappointment. Selective ejection? Forget it. The barrels don't have bores in them. That shotgun would've exploded in your face. Metal textures and controls look like they're wet even when it's dry. No matter how big or small caliber you select the magazine capacity and the receiver size will remain the same. Iron sights are plain unusable. The in-game reticle stays on even when you mount and it doesn't line up with the actual sights. The scopes are just plain atrocious, They look like a jumbled mess of random scope parts glued together with no thought put into it. The mounts look extremely ugly especially the part where rings meet the base. And as icing on the cake, they are mounted half a meter forward for a single stupid reason. So that you can see the scope on your gun in the first-person view. Spare my eyes, I can't look at this travesty. This is supposed to be a hunting game, aimed at gun enthusiasts. So let's insult their vision and intelligence with the worst excuse for scope and mounts in existence. Variable zoom hasn't yet been invented in this game. Night vision and thermals are also omitted. This is especially baffling given that the game is obviously sponsored by a number of big brands including Bushnell who specialize in optics. There are even specific models of binoculars and rangefinders but not a single real-life scope. Go figure.

But guess what, there's more. Every ejected casing sounds like a shotgun shell falling on the concrete floor. Enjoy your rifles! This is cringeworthy. What's the point of making a hunting game when you obviously don't give a rat's @ss about the subject? Beats me. But I'm just getting started with this review.

The wildlife is also really lazily implemented. Animations are hilarious and destroy all immersion if you look at them for too long. Some animals go totally in sync, which I admit is rather amusing. Red deer look nothing like their real life counter part. Which in my case is especially annoying because the red deer is my one of my favorite examples of the European wildlife and it's such a majestic and proud animal and a sight to behold. Traces of bodily functions are realistically scarce compared to COTW which is ridiculous. Besides tracks and poop, there's urine food leftovers, and bitten vegetation. For all of these, there are multiple states of freshness which is cool but it breaks often when you find half-eaten corn on the top of a mountain in the Colorado wilderness. The fur would've been passable for a game made 5 or 6 years ago. For such a recent title it leaves a lot to be desired. Callers work 100% of the time on every single animal in hearing range. Just spam it while running and you'll get answers for your calls then wait for a bit, don't worry it won't be long because the critter will go straight to you stopinng for a split second occasionally. You are garateed a perfect shot. If you are in a stand you'll have to try very hard to mess it up. Dog mechanics are not explained and will require a Dark Souls like approach of some reading which will tell you that one dog additional capability is retreving birds and the other one points. Everything else regarding tracking will require experimentation.

In their promotional video developers of this title promised that you'll see predators hunting. Never saw that. Perhaps I'm just unlucky. But from what I was able to gather this is the worst animal behavior I've seen in a hunting game yet. The only good thing I can say about them is that they do vary in age and size. That's it.

So, in conclusion, obviously, I don't recommend this game. As mentioned in other reviews, this game definitely has a lot of potential, but sadly it is wasted by devs laziness and lack of attention to detail. And the main reason is that the devs just abandoned improving the game and switched over to creating paid DLCs which are terrible. Just read the reviews for the warden DLC. I only bought bears and Berettas. And feel silly for doing so, Berettas have their bores welded and the bears are as bare as all the other animals. (pun intended)

If you suffered through my ramblings - thank you sincerely. I hope I can help you in making the right decision.