As stated in another review, it would be difficult to review Way of the Hunter without comparing it to COTW, since that's what most folks who enjoy this genre are familiar with.


Let's get into how Way of the Hunter does things.

- Environment graphic with recent update is way more better than CotW. I cannot look at CotW graphic any more due to bad render distance and close range is worse than WotH.

- Hope dev will add tracking dog soon.

- Animal behavior seems more realistic. One spooked animal will, in turn, spook the whole herd. Hunting pressure can cause animals to completely avoid an area for a while. Deer, elk, etc. all seem to graze or "feed through" a zone rather than standing stationary for the entire feeding session. Deer will turn their ears and flick their tails while they feed, periodically raising their heads and looking around. Also, whitetails will show their trademark white tail when fleeing, and mule deer have that graceful mulie hop. I've yet to see a herd return to a need zone in the same day after being shot at.

- Animal aggression is a recently added feature. I've only experienced it once in-game so far, in which I was charged by a single mountain goat after spooking the entire herd. Seemed a little...arcadey. You can look back through the patch notes to get an idea of their initial implementation of aggression. Not a huge fan of how they've set it up, but I'm sure it will be refined as the developers continue making improvements.

- Weapon ballistics are much better than COTW, factoring in bullet velocity, gravity, wind, elevation, and coriolis (so I'm told). Terminal ballistics is measured in joules, and each animal has a range of joules (low to high) which is most effective for an efficient kill. You aren't punished for overkill in the trophy lodge (doesn't lower trophy rating), but the idea of overkill and reduction of harvestable meat does result in lower monetary payouts for using "too much gun".

- Blood trails are one of my favorite features of the game. If you turn off the glowy bits in the UI settings, you must actively search for blood, which may be on the ground, on the grass, or on the stem of a bush the deer ran through. Blood has different colors based on what organs were (or weren't) hit, and different impurities (such a bubbles or bits of grass) to help you determine if you made a good shot or not.

- The maps are big...more that you'll want to try to walk acoss, and very detailed. The terrain geometry is well done, and I've yet to see tears in textures or seams where two sections of the map meet. Overall, the scenery is gorgeous.

- Graphically, it looks good. The anti-aliasing could be toned down a bit, but I run a sharpening filter through the nVidia overlay to reduce fuzziness and film grain.

- Performance is good.

- WotH solves my single biggest issue with COTW - its locked 480m render distance. Way of the Hunter will render as far out as your system will handle, which makes proper spot-and-stalk hunting much more realistic and fun.

- All hunting stands are prebuilt and spread around the map. Most that I've found so far have been in decent locations.

- Herd quality (overall trophy ratings) can be improved by removing low-fitness males from the herd (culling). This will, over time, give you more opportunity to take a nice trophy animal. Killing females will lower the overall population of a herd.


So, while WotH may not offer the customization features or some of the quality-of-life features of CotW, it represents hunting better in the things that matter - animal behavior, natural beaty, and ballistics. And, I'm perfectly okay with that. I'd rather the developers put the time and effort into making a proper hunting game than a hunting arcade with too much feature creep.

Overall, I'd say if you're one of those who wish CotW had more realism, then add Way of the Hunter to your library. You won't be disappointed.

The game has a depth of field effect that you can't turn off that makes everything look absolutely horrendous. The fact that the game devs are this incompetent is downright embarrassing. I got a genuine headache trying to play this

I tried to make this work once I saw the first rifle you buy in game was the same as the first gun I ever bought irl (Remington Model 783), but I couldn't get into it or deal with the technical issues. The landscape is pretty nice, but nothing amazing even on ultra settings and the initial dialogue of the protagonist and the NPCs is rather cheesy. The parts I found unacceptable though were the multiple/inconsistent buffered/dropped inputs, major frame skips whenever you shoot an animal (whether on low or ultra settings), and bad static audio that randomly occurs (initially I heard it while driving so I thought it was a unique audio choice with the radio, but then I heard it while walking along a creek and it made me think there was something wrong with my speakers).

Beyond that, the mechanics and your general movement just don't feel good. Like when you go to the range in the tutorial, you're told to zero in your rifle and I got kind of excited because I remembered when I first learned about windage and elevation but it ended up just being "press left or right on the d-pad to zero in" and that's executed as an immediate adjustment to elevation in increments of 50M...while still ADS. This mechanic is further degraded once you see that aiming with hunter sense active (which you can have on all the time) tells you where your shot will impact despite being "zeroed-in." There's also a HUD icon that tells you the wind direction and it's speed, but this doesn't affect your shot placement at all. It's just so weird to make a real hunting mechanic so instant and irrelevant while also seeing a loading icon appear when switching between your primary and secondary weapon that takes way too long. Maybe if I didn't have marksmanship the whole zeroing in wouldn't be a big deal, but I think this is actually the first game I've ever seen go through a loading process when switching between two equipped weapons.

I will say one part that I got genuine enjoyment out of was when I was able to crawl up within 10M of a pheasant and blast it with a shotgun. Initially I was just laughing because the idea of getting that close is absurd, but then I saw the ballistics report and watched the entire spread go through it's body (and I still missed the heart)! I was dying!!