Way of the Hunter Review (WarriorMan256)
This game is fun and I'm still playing it instead of COTW. It's new and I'm hopeful that they'll address things. COTW on the other hand, we all know what happens there. Game Breaking bug, 6 months later a fix that brings 3 new big bugs with it. They've already addressed a major issue for PS5 which is nice to see, as they're at least paying attention to users.
Key positives:
Bullet ballistics. They seem pretty good with bullet drop and shooting a running animal
Shot placement is really all that matters. If you gut shot something, you've ruined it
Animal herd management seems amazing
There are lots of things here written in many reviews
Now for why I chose no
Audio problems: I didn't hear this for the first few days but sometimes the rivers sound like you're on a runway standing behind an overloaded 747 dreamlifter at 110% throttle trying to take off. Animal calls also do this occasionally.
Guns, Ammo, Gear: there are none 😒 They touted having licensed everything, even ammo but you can't even select ammo. There are only a handful of rifles/shotguns. I really, really don't care if it says it's a Remington 783 or if it's a Billy Joe Bob 1242, I'm sure some people will really like that and I suppose if they add a specific gun that you own/use that's pretty cool. I don't hate it, I just want a selection.
Levleing up callers? No Thanks! This is just dumb. The predator caller for example only works on rabbits until you level up your calling skill. It's just stupid and I hate it. You can level up all the callers by using any caller so I just shot a bunch of Does (there should be a different plural for Doe, that's dumb too 😄) and I'm at level 2 now anyway.
Character Skills: Most of these are great but there are some I'd want to disable and can't. The biggest of them being the skills you get for walking around crouched. After you have crouched around for 15km you walk 15% faster but also produce 10% more noise. I don't want to walk faster, i want to stay quiet and as far as I can tell you can't turn this off.
Hunter Sense: Not being able to identify things unless hunter sense on or gauge distance is kinda sucky too. I've just gotten used to having it on all the time and it's super grainy and dark all the time now because that's how they want me to play?
Then there is the gun energy factor. This is cool and something that I hope gets tweaked.
If you shoot an elk with a 338, a class 6 gun on a class 6 animal but you're too close it will explode like a grenade and ruin all your meet. I shot an elk, direct heart shot. i didn't hit anything else from about 70 yards. I lost over 300lbs of meat......... Uhhhh what? No
Now for the one everyone will hate:
It has difficulty options which is amazing. Sometimes I just want to screw around and not spend literal hours trying to follow a herd of sheep.
I think the animals are a too skittish on the easiest difficulty(explorer). I've spent most of my time on the normal (adventurer) mode but later at night or when I'm just burnt out and want to relax for a moment I'll switch to explorer and things can still hear me breath from 4 miles away it seems. Yes, yes, you just said "Git Gud Bro" because you're obviously the #1 hunter IRL and in game in all of the galaxy and I'm the worst player to ever play a game, ever. I just think easy mode should be easy. I was super excited to see difficulty options so then you insane players that actually want to spend 6 hours tracking a 3 star elk only to have it run away and you say "It's fine, I'll get it next time" have something to do and I can still have fun playing a game 😄
Bugs: This will probably get fixed sooner than 6 months like some "other" games. The audio is a problem but not a game breaker. Blood Trailer however.... They just vanish and because the animals don't actually leave tracks of any kind which is just weird you will likely never find that animal. Did it fall through the map? Did Bigfoot eat it? Did Nosferatu take it to suck it's blood? Just like asking How many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know
They did address some things in their latest update, however I am now seeing crashes often. Sometimes this is while shooting, sometimes while walking. It's frustrating to shoot at an animal and then get a "fatal error" so I've stopped playing until the next update. Hopefully they'll figure whatever this is out and I can test out the changes they made and change this review
Had to edit this to clean it up a bit, it was turning into a 400 page novel