Recent reviews by Kentobu

TLDR; I have never been more excited for a game release, and I spent the night of release playing other fishing games after trying to enjoy this broken husk of a game.

It kills me to have to say this, but right now I cannot recommend this game at all. As someone with full trust in Expansive Worlds and over 500 hours on the Hunter Call of the Wild, this game should NOT even have been released in it's current state.

There are major problems with the current release. Chief among them for me are the absolutely terrible appearance of the water, and the lack of private lobbies for multiplayer. This was advertised as a game where you can hop in a vehicle with your friends and go fishing together, but you're relegated to trying to find more than one open space in the dedicated servers and hoping that you and your friends can squeeze in. Private lobbies is a basic functionality among fishing games in the genre, and the lack of it was an astounding choice by the development team.

I also have problems with the number of fish species present on such a large map. 12 fish, with kilometers of room? All the varied environments mean little difference when you're catching the same few species over and over.

Additionally, I have had issues with compatibility on linux through proton. The shop has been consistently crashing my desktop environment, which is preventing me from completing the tutorial missions. I can't remember the last time a game that didn't have anti-cheat gave me any major issues, so this was disappointing in light of the sheer compatibility the Hunter has consistently shown.

There are a lot of positive reviews for this game where the reviewers acknowledge that the game is in terrible shape, but they trust the devs, so they rate it positive. Do not be fooled by these people. If you purchase now, you are getting a bare-bones, half-baked fishing game with poor mechanics, ugly and uninteractive water, and backwards multiplayer implementation. I have faith that EW will ensure that this team will fix the game. I plan on revising my review at a later date when the game is better, but I will reserve a positive review for when the game has actually earned it.

Runs great on Linux through proton, provided you're using AMD parts. Make sure that you're not using amdvlk, and things should work well.