Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Release Date: February 16, 2017
Publisher: Avalanche Studios Group, Expansive Worlds
I picked up
theHunter: Call of the Wild from the Epic Game Store as it was one of their free games of the week between June 22 - June 28th, but not because I wanted to play a hunting game, but because it was self-advertised as an open world hunting game. This meant a couple of things. First, this was not going to be an arcade shooter hunting game akin to
Cabela's Big Game Hunter, but you were exploring an area for wildlife to shoot. Second, and related to the first, I could hypothetically play this game without actually killing anything and just enjoy whatever the biome was where I would be hunting. My thought was that I could play this game by looking for the wildlife, and just observing them, and that was it. Based on the game's description, it did not seem like there was going to be a traditional "fail" aspect to this game, so why not add it to my Epic Game Store free game catalog?
Although I was not expecting to play and write about the game as quickly as I have now done, but on Sunday, I read an article from
ComicBook talking about how the last two games offered through the Epic Game Store (including
theHunter: Call of the Wild) are "Some of the Worst of 2023." Now, I am not an advocate of/for Epic Games but I have 100% benefited from their initial free game a day for a week during a specific time of the year into a free 1-2 games a week, every week, for the entire year that has now been going on for. . . a while now. Which is essentially at least 52 free games a year for nothing more than having an account through the Epic Game Store. True, some of the games vary in quality from
Batman: Arkham Asylum and
Wolfenstein: The New Order to
Bloons TD6 and
Next Up Hero, but to complain that the free games being offered by a multi-billion-dollar corporation as "disappointing" because "these titles are pretty dated" came across as incredibly entitled. So this article is what lit that campfire under my posterior to actually playing this game (weeks/years) earlier than I had anticipated.
Before we get into the actual game, a little bit of context which you are free to skip over (because who wants to actually read someone's life story when all they want are the instructions to the recipe!?). I do have a couple of years of experience duck hunting. Between 1992-1994, I went duck hunting with my Dad and late Grandfather. Before this, I had gone through a hunter safety course which I thought was incredibly informative and not just from a hunting perspective as it also covered general gun safety, hunter safety, wilderness education, and how to stay safe if you find yourself lost in different situations and environments. It was also where I found out that I am left-eye dominant (I aim with my left eye) even though I am for the most part right-handed. While duck hunting, I shot maybe 4.5 ducks (my Dad and I shot the same duck we were "tracking"). I was also responsible for cleaning the ducks I shot as well as several others because there was no way either my Dad or Grandfather are the types to not have me participate in all aspects of the hunting process if I was going to actually shoot and kill a wild duck.
So after downloading the incredibly large 73 GB of data to play this "pretty dated" game from 2017, I jumped into the open world of big game preserve hunting. Maybe it was a bit presumptuous to try the game with "High" graphical settings, but I did, and that was a mistake as the introduction crawled along at an unbelievably slow frame rate, maybe 5-10 fps, with waits of up to 45 seconds waiting for the video to catch up with the spoken dialogue, but I could not tell because I don't think Epic Games has an fps overlay. Then I took control of my first-person perspective hunter and the game continued to crawl ever so slowly, so I downgraded the settings to "Medium" across the board, but the movement was still painfully slow and I could tell that the birds flying off in the distance were flying very jitteringly. So I moved the settings down to "Low" as well as some additional modifications like water reflections, shadows, fog distance, etc., and still, it felt like the game was chugging along.
Eventually, I realized that the player was supposed to move slowly, because hunting is not a sprinting sport, but even with the Run function moving about as slowly as
Dear Esther, I knew that I was not going to be able to experience this game the way that I was hoping I could. Getting anywhere felt like a chore, although I will note that the
ridiculous nearly-eight-foot vertical leap was very smooth and did not seem to be hampered by and struggling hardware issues. Firing any one of the three guns I was armed with also took a sturdy press of the mouse button as it did not feel as responsive as games like
Left 4 Dead or even
Portal. Maybe there is something to be said about respecting what it is you are shooting and knowing when to shoot and when not. Or again, my computer is just not well equipped for this game.
Overall, I cannot say that I had a positive experience with theHunter: Call of the Wild, likely due to my computer not being able to run the game as well as a newer computer likely could. Even after looking at the minimum requirements, I was surprised that I could not run the game well enough even on the lowest settings. If I am feeling ambitious, I might try to load it up on the Steam Deck. However, the game is currently rated "Unsupported" so maybe my hopes of playing an open-world hunting game without actually killing anything and just enjoying the scenery is not to be realized at least for now. Or perhaps I just need a single-player offline vegetarian survival sim.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Try To Take Your Own Advice
P.S. I could not find a great place to mention it, but there is a reserve warden (or something like that) named Colton Locke, who likes to be called "Doc" by his friends and everyone else, who walks you through your radio in the tutorial and through the rest of the game from what I could tell. Telling you about where he spotted tracks recently and sending you the location on your GPS, that he recently saw some ne'er do wells doing not good things around the preserve, and just general chit-chat. I did a brief look through the audio settings (so I might have missed a button or toggle), but you are unable to turn off Doc to enjoy the wilderness on your own.
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