Often, I felt like I was playing a hiking simulator rather than a hunting game.Īt outposts, you can buy better hunting gear, better ammunition, better sights and even all-terrain vehicles to tool around in. I hiked around for miles and miles though trees, lakes and mountains and rarely found any signs of life. The woodlands in The Hunter: Call of the Wild are strangely devoid of any random or stray wildlife. I came face to face with a family of cautious but friendly family of black bears which I fed in Banff, for example. There are birds, deer, coyotes, wolves, foxes, mountain lions, bears and even small animals like skunks, porcupines and rabbits. You cannot drown but jumping from high places does damage which eventually does kill you and ends the monotony for a few seconds.Īs a life-long city dweller with infrequent visits to the Canadian wilderness, even I know that the forests here are teaming with all sorts of wildlife. My experience was so mind-numbing at times that I actually tried to find ways of committing suicide by jumping off cliffs or trying to drown myself in a lake.

The need to stalk your prey this way makes the game so slow, so methodical, so sluggish that to accomplish anything worthwhile is just excruciatingly painful. So, any time you are hunting, you have to crouch down low to the ground and clamber along at a snail’s pace. There is the option to run but if you do, it is guaranteed that you will scare whatever you are tracking. Your only choice then is to follow their tracks through the grass and the trees, hoping you can creep up on them. If they get spooked, they will split the scene at a speed rivaling the Flash. All of the animals, even the bears which is kinda odd, are easily frightened at the sight or the sound of a human being. Although you can trail everything from bears to deer to bison, to do so takes a colossal amount of patience.

It is a shame the same cannot be said for the rest of my experience with The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It is an experience I have never forgotten. I actually stopped to take in the scene because that break of dawn over the mountains was so breathtaking and so mesmerizing that it reminded me of a family trip to Banff, Alberta and standing before the majestic Rocky Mountains. The detail in the sights and sounds of the wilderness were the highlights of the game for me especially when the sun rose during one of my excursions.

The hunting simulator puts you in the middle of two picturesque wildlife reserves which are beautiful in every way. Knowing all that, it was a very odd experience for me, of all people, to play through The Hunter: Call of the Wild.

The hunter call of the wild review