
Game Details
- Publisher: Maximum Games
- Developer: Neopica
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Hunting
- Pros: Lots of content; decently fun and addictive gameplay
- Cons: Not much of a “simulator”; inconsistent visuals; unsatisfying shooting; unlocking everything
- MSRP: $40
Hunting Simulator features 37 species including multiple
types of deer, waterfoul, moose, elk, predators such as foxes, coyotes, bears, and mountain lions, and even smaller animals like rabbits among many others. There are 12 large open
environments to hunt in ranging from dense forests to deserts to arctic tundra
and the game also features dynamic weather and lighting as the time of day
changes as you play. The game also features 17 different firearms and 50 accessories
to help with your hunts. You can play solo in free hunt or take on specific
missions in each environment as well as play online multiplayer to hunt with
your friends. Hunting Simulator is undeniably a fully featured experience that
offers plenty to do.
It is in its execution where things get murky, however. See
all of that stuff I listed out in the previous paragraph? It all has to be
unlocked. The game starts you off with just one environment and a couple of
rifles to choose from and that’s it. Unlocking everything else is done by
completing missions and seeing everything the game has to offer takes
potentially dozens of hours. Better guns, more powerful scopes, and even
binoculars have to be unlocked which means the first several hours of the game
are a real grind until you open up the fun stuff. I don’t mind unlocking stuff
in games at all, but when 95% of the content is locked away – particularly in a
hunting game where a lot of the fun comes in the freedom of doing whatever you
want – it becomes a problem.
The hunting gameplay, at least, is pretty straightforward
and exactly what you’d expect. You walk around large open wilderness areas
looking for animals and have to be mindful of the wind as well as how much
noise your make and how visible you are which are all represented by a neat
U.I. popup that shows how aware animals are of your presence. You track animals
by either finding their scat / footprints and following them and you also get
onscreen indicators of nearby animals that are making noise. Finding animals is
rarely a problem in Hunting Simulator as they’re freaking everywhere. Unless,
of course, you’re doing a mission where you’re looking for a specific species
and, in a particularly egregious example of videgame-ness, they’ll suddenly be
extraordinarily hard to find.
I think tracking and scouting and hiking all over the maps
is actually quite well done. The onscreen indicators make finding animals
fairly easy and enjoyable, though you can turn them off if you want more of a
realistic challenge. One thing that isn’t exactly realistic is that the animals
almost always stand out in stark contrast to their environment and are easy to
see which, as someone who has hunted for real, couldn’t be further from
reality.
While the hunt is fun and surprisingly addictive, actually
pulling the trigger for the kill is pretty disappointing and unsatisfying. It
always feels like a crapshoot whenever you fire a round because it is so darn
unpredictable. The wind does affect the bullet’s flight, and there is bullet
drop over long distances, but even after hours and hours of playing I never
felt truly comfortable taking a shot. Even when you do hit an animal they also
don’t always go down like you expect. Again, this is somewhat realistic, but at
the same time it feels random and arbitrary. I will say, though, that
particular complaint seems to mostly come up with smaller animals like rabbits
or birds while larger game have more consistent hit boxes.
My final comment on Hunting Simulator is that calling it a
“simulator” is a bit of an insult to real hunting. I get it that concessions
have to be made to make a fun videogame, and very few simulator games are
actually realistic, but Hunting Simulator takes it a bit too far. First off,
there are no rules or regulations so you can just kill anything and everything
you see regardless of species or sex. That’s freaking weird! You’re even
encouraged to kill as much as possible in order to score points to climb online
leaderboards. Some of what you can do in the game is also actually straight up
illegal in my neck of the woods in Idaho, though I’m not sure about the laws in
other areas. Specifically things like hunting at night or using drones to find
animals are considered either unsafe or unethical in Idaho and seeing them in
this game kind of throws the “simulator” idea out the window for me. The
complaints in this paragraph don’t mean it isn’t still fun to play, but, yeesh.
Visually, Hunting Simulator is incredibly inconsistent and
ranges from surprisingly good looking – as long as you’re sitting still – to
downright ugly when you’re looking through a scope at anything further than
50-yards away. The game has an extremely close draw distance which means ground
cover is only rendered fairly close to you. Flowers and bushes and grass pop in
right before your eyes. When all of the details are actually present the game
can look quite good. There is good looking lighting and weather effects, too,
which can make for some fairly realistic visuals. Move around at all, though,
and it all starts glitching and looking funky. And, like I said, look through a
scope at anything past a certain distance and the ground cover detail won’t be
present at all, which makes the game world look really flat and ugly. The
animals look fairly good and have decent animation, so no complaints there.
There isn’t much to say about the sound other than it is perfectly adequate.
The animal noises are all realistic and distinctive and recognizable.
All in all, I’m pretty torn on Hunting Simulator. The
nuts and bolts mechanics of tracking and hunting are actually fairly well done,
and the game has an impressive amount of content, but there are too many little
niggling issues that detract from the experience. I wish the shooting felt
better and was more satisfying. I wish you didn’t have to grind to unlock
everything. I wish the game looked more consistent visually. And I really wish
it was more of an actual simulator than a kill whatever you want free for all.
I have enjoyed my time with it overall, but there is clearly a lot of wasted potential. I would suggest you might want to wait to see how theHunter: Call of the Wild turns out, but there is no concrete release date for it yet so you may be waiting a while. I also want to make it clear that I don’t mind the $40 MSRP for Hunting Simulator (or theHunter, for that matter) as it has more than enough content to justify the price. If you’re desperate for a new hunting game Hunting Simulator may be worth a look in spite of its problems.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
I have enjoyed my time with it overall, but there is clearly a lot of wasted potential. I would suggest you might want to wait to see how theHunter: Call of the Wild turns out, but there is no concrete release date for it yet so you may be waiting a while. I also want to make it clear that I don’t mind the $40 MSRP for Hunting Simulator (or theHunter, for that matter) as it has more than enough content to justify the price. If you’re desperate for a new hunting game Hunting Simulator may be worth a look in spite of its problems.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.