Foreword

As a preface, I want to say that I enjoy hunting games and know a thing or two about hunting in real life. I've spent a significant amount of time in COTW and hunted a lot in RDR 2. I'll be honest, I bought this game solely because it features SAKO and Beretta firearms, which I'm a huge fan of. The screenshots looked decent, and the dreaded IGN review painted a pretty picture. There are also a few paid videos of the game on YouTube by some relatively popular content creators, so if you take the time, you'll get a good look at the game and its mechanics. But what I want to 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 that 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 the entire time you're there. There's no day/night cycle.

The weapons are a big disappointment. Selective ejection? Forget it. The barrels don't even 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 what caliber you select, the magazine capacity and receiver size remain the same. Iron sights are completely unusable. The in-game reticle stays on even when you mount, and it doesn't line up with the actual sights. The scopes are atrocious—just a jumbled mess of random parts glued together with no thought put into it. The mounts look extremely ugly, especially where the rings meet the base, and to make things worse, the scopes are mounted half a meter forward for one ridiculous reason: so you can see the scope on your gun in first-person view. It's absurd. This is supposed to be a hunting game aimed at gun enthusiasts, yet it insults their intelligence with the worst excuse for scopes and mounts in existence. Variable zoom hasn't even been invented in this game. Night vision and thermals? Also omitted. This is baffling given the obvious sponsorships from big brands like Bushnell, who specialize in optics. They included specific models of binoculars and rangefinders, but not a single real-life scope. Go figure.

But wait, there's more. Every ejected casing sounds like a shotgun shell falling on a concrete floor. Enjoy your rifles! This is cringeworthy. What's the point of making a hunting game if you clearly don't care about the subject? I have no idea. And I'm just getting started.

The wildlife is also lazily implemented. Animations are hilarious and destroy immersion if you look at them for too long. Some animals move in perfect sync, which is amusing but unrealistic. Red deer look nothing like their real-life counterparts, which is especially annoying for me because they're one of my favorite examples of European wildlife. The fur quality would've been passable for a game made 5 or 6 years ago, but for such a recent title, it leaves a lot to be desired. Traces of bodily functions are scarce compared to COTW, which is ridiculous. Besides tracks and poop, there's urine, food leftovers, and bitten vegetation, with multiple states of freshness, which is cool—except when you find half-eaten corn on top of a mountain in the Colorado wilderness.

Callers work 100% of the time on every animal in range. Just spam them while running, and you'll get responses. Then wait a bit, and the animal will come straight to you, stopping for a split second occasionally. It's a guaranteed perfect shot. If you're in a stand, you'll have to try hard to mess it up. The dog mechanics are poorly explained, requiring a Dark Souls-like approach where you need to read to learn that one dog retrieves birds and the other points. Everything else regarding tracking requires trial and error.

In their promotional video, the developers promised you'd see predators hunting. I never saw that, though maybe I'm just unlucky. But from what I've gathered, this is the worst animal behavior I've seen in a hunting game. The only good thing I can say about the wildlife is that they vary in age and size. That's it.

Conclusion

I obviously don't recommend this game. As mentioned in other reviews, this game has a lot of potential, but it's wasted due to the developers' laziness and lack of attention to detail. The main issue is that the developers abandoned improvements and switched to creating paid DLCs, which are terrible. Just read the reviews for the Warden DLC. I only bought the Bears and Berettas DLC and feel silly for doing so. The Berettas have their bores welded shut, and the bears are just as bare as the other animals (pun intended).

If you made it through my rambling—thank you sincerely. I hope this helps you make the right decision.