Way of The Hunter - Review

WOW! My first impression was WOW! 

Having played The Hunter Call of the Wild (COTW) for almost 1,000 hours and being so frustrated sometimes with bug after bug and animal zone resets and massive downloads with each update the bugs are like whack a mole, but yet I enjoy playing COTW - until?

A new hunting game arrived and, in my honest opinion, has "dethroned" COTW. Way of The Hunter is head and shoulders above the arcade game called COTW.

Overall: Way of The Hunter is more engaging, has a slick user interface, is more graphically appealing, has incredible animals, the best of the best hit analysis, superior reload animations, licensed equipment, and a Jeep to get you around the massive hunting areas.

Graphics: Way of The Hunter, graphically speaking, is a big step above COTW and you feel immersed within the environment. When I run COTW, my GPU fans start to scream after a few minutes; with Way of The Hunter, my GPU churns out 80FPS with just a slight increase in GPU fans. Way of The Hunter is more optimized graphically, both visually and in code.

Animals: Way of The Hunter's animals are far superior to COTW's in appearance and behavior. Seeing a herd in the distance and spook is awesome. - This is NOT an arcade shooter as COTW has become.

Blood Trails and Tracking: It is best to put down a marker where you shot the animal by hitting x while looking through the scope or binos to help find the blood trail. Once you move to the area, you can employ hunters sense by hitting q and find the blood, then E to inspect - that will tell you roughly how far the animal will run until it expires, but it is only a rough estimate. My blood splatter said the animal should expire in 50m, but I found him at 147m.  Tracking is fun and challenging; no arcade help here.

Hit Analysis: Way of The Hunter has an excellent hit analysis system providing abundant information, including hit location, cavity damage, vital organs hit, weight, date & time, weather, and region.

Unique DNA and Animal Growth System: Way of The Hunter employs a DNA analysis that indicates which animals are superior and should only be taken when they reach full adulthood. You will not know the DNA until the harvest, meaning you have already killed the animal. However, when glassing and spotting animals, you are provided with the animal's status as far as age and star rating goes, and you can make your determination on which animal to cull to serve the DNA pool better. So, a mature male with only a 2-star rating should be culled.

Guns and Attachments: Complete the first three missions, and you have access to everything; I said everything!

Rest and Relaxation: It is FREE; who would guess that sleeping would cost you nothing?

Hands-Free: You don't have to look at those dirty hands in the way of The Hunter; first, you don't have crusty hands, and second you can simply choose not to carry anything as you walk. 

Zeroing your Weapon: Go to the range to zero - quick travel, and zero - easy peasy.

What happened to COTW? It became an overly bugged arcade game that lost focus on making a better hunting game; the developers would instead push out DLCs after DLCs to increase revenue while introducing more and more bugs with minimal attention to fixing what was broken; instead, they "fixed" things that were working fine and in the process of the claim to make it better they made it worse. The last two updates were over 20GB in size, and the developers decided to "reset" all the zones meaning that your hard work discovering them was removed, and you were back to the start.

The arcadish style of COTW was mostly due to and emphasized by many YouTubers making video content showing no hunting skills or tactics but showing themselves standing across a lake and blasting a herd of deer, then screaming OMG OMG! Look, it is 07:30 - fast travel to lake X with my new AR 308 and slaughter a herd of deer. Now that is real hunting!

So, will I stop playing The Hunter Call of The Wild? the short answer is yes, I will spend my few available hours and money on the superior hunting simulator called Way of The Hunter.