Way of the Hunter Review

"Walking About"

Campaign

August 29, 2022 at 9:45pm
By Jason Stettner

With a strange focus on ethical hunting you’ll be exploring an open world taking on a variety of challenges and trying to gather the best possible trophies. The game is centrally focused on throwing you into the open world and providing some story based content. The narrative was rather weak with it just being an excuse to take over the old grandfather’s plot of land.

You get some cartoon based story bits as you progress and honestly they just weren’t worth the time. It was really focused on ethical hunting which I guess is fine, but it’s also a video game and I think I got the point after awhile what we were doing. As you know, mowing down the various deer with my vehicle is totally ethical.

Anyways, The game grants you a large space to explore. Enjoy working on that story based element I mentioned or just go out and hunt. I actually wish the latter was more easier to get into as I felt somewhat guided to do story stuff and I prefer a sandbox space in this scenario. Even when going into story stuff a lot of the time I was absolutely lost on what it wanted me to do.

I’m fine with hands-off approaches in gaming, but there should be a little bit of steering for this one as I felt very lost near the start of this one. It took awhile to get a hold of what it was asking me to do essentially. From there you gain new areas to hunt within and find additional goals or requests.

Gameplay

The experience revolves around the paying for weapons and then upgrades to those weapons. There are of course some supporting tools to throw into the equation as well. Call onto the ducks, then blast them away. It can be rather hard to track what you knock down though which is a bit tiring. You do get to use the environment to monitor the initial creatures such as seeing certain tracks or portions where an animal has been interacting with it. You get to these spots by walking very slowly or driving around.

There are fast travel points but these are fairly spread out across the world. When it comes to the visuals I found them to be really great if I was standing in a single spot. As soon as I would move there were terrible amounts of pop-in. It might be the best looking of the genre niche perhaps, but that isn’t saying much. The trees don’t have any pop-in being far spread, but everything else you see in the close to mid ground horribly arrives as you move about. It’s awful from that perspective.

On the Xbox Series X you get two visual mode options. The first is a quality mode providing 1512p at 30fps and then a performance mode which is 1080p at 60fps. For a next generation game that’s honestly rather pitiful considering the pop-in elements. So with that, the visuals impress while not impressing at all which is an awkward combination.

The Conclusion

Way of the Hunter provides some well balanced hunting mechanics that make it enticing, while at the same time failing to really deliver a satisfying next generation world. I love the quantity of animals you’ll see in a pack at times, I absolutely hate seeing them start to run through cover that’s magically appearing as I traverse.

The ethical hunting felt overly pushed, I get it and it makes sense but it’s also a video game. I liked what this game was attempting to achieve, at the same time it failed to hit the mark. There’s bad voice work, really awkward text elements and other problems amongst the graphical issues that drag this down from its full potential.

Read our Hunting Simulator 2 Review
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Way of the Hunter Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 6.3