Hunting Simulator 2 Review

"A Bark Filled Hunt"

Campaign

July 3, 2020 at 3:59am
By Jason Stettner

This is a fairly straight forward type of experience. It’s a game that aims to emulate modern hunting, giving you open areas to explore and a wide range of tools. Outside of the tutorial there are no goals, no missions and it’s just an open series of hunting grounds. I suppose that makes sense for this type of game, but it still would have been nice to get some sort of goal system. Your adventures start off at this super fancy lodge area.

It’s straight up majestic, with options to adjust the atmosphere further. This is where you have trophies, purchase gear, buy tags and even go down to the firing range to try out your equipment. Once you’re done in this calming place, you pick from six areas to go hunt. It’s basically three separate regions, with two options within each of them.

The places you visit are quite vast, with a number of iconic spots to hit in order to open up fast travel options. It’s honestly hard to dig into this aspect, since there isn’t a whole lot to this. Again, it’s very straight forward. You buy the tags, gather gear and then wander around hunting. There are some restrictions on what you can hunt, and it does capture the just of what I imagine the regular open area style of tracking would be like.

Gameplay

This is a bit of a sluggish experience in terms of movement, though I suppose it’s somewhat natural to the whole idea behind wandering about looking for animals. You do get a faithful companion in the form of a dog. That’s fairly cool. At the same time I didn’t necessarily see the need for it since I could track fine without it. That being said, it was a nice addition and gave me some company out there. That’s especially true since you could interact with the dog, so overall a nice touch. While movement is straight forward, the guns felt somewhat realistic in terms of the challenge to get that shot right.

I didn’t have much trouble mastering it, but knew that the margin for error is there as it should be. It’s also neat how you’re leveling the character in the background as you run about. The environments are actually quite lovely, and very large in scale. I did notice performance issues, but they weren’t too detrimental since this is a single player setting. It runs fine enough for what this is, I did feel it was important to mention though for those curious about that aspect.

With the solid looking areas, I was very pleased with the flora density. The areas felt packed with grass and trees in the regions that had it. It felt expansive roaming about, though I did notice some minor distance grass pop-in. It was well hidden for the most part though, at least in those heavily forested sections. The animals you hunt were decently varied, with thirty-three species of what I’d consider to be popular options.

They had some realistic behaviors, and it was somewhat tiring to hunt them. The thrill of walking after a dying animal or trying to get that shot well lined up did get boring quickly. It’s quite repetitive, and not too thrilling. That’s part of this experience I suppose, but it could have been more engaging or something. I also wanted to note that with weapons and accessories, they have over a hundred and sixty options present which is impressive for selection. Also, as a quick note this is a single player game in case you were wondering if it offered coop to any degree.

The Conclusion

Hunting Simulator 2 delivers on its titled premise, with a wide range of options for going about on the hunt while also being somewhat boring at the same time. It just feels repetitive due to the setup, and this will hit a very specific niche.

I think this is perfect for a particular type of audience, while others might find it far too repetitive. It was calming, but not really too thrilling. I loved the lodge structure, that was great to chill in. I also found the dog aspect to be a nice touch and I’m sure many will enjoy choosing from the various canine companions.

I think they have a neat foundation here, and with additional content alongside further polish they could have something special in later iterations. It has its moments, lots of gear and some unique areas that do nail the atmosphere. I found this at times to be enjoyable, it does offer the ultimate hunting experience.

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Hunting Simulator 2 Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by HomeRunPR

Rating Overall: 5.7