I have put over 1,000 hours into this game and to look at where it is at now brings me nothing but sadness. A beautiful game with an extremely satisfying hunting experience, even if it isn't all that realistic. The grinding process for Great Ones is just that, a grind, but once you see that Level 10 - Fabled, its all worth it. However, with youtuber Scarecrow discovering a game breaking exploit called "Herd Management/HM" he unknowingly killed the game for a massive portion of the community. It was then adopted by many other content creators and it's just completely destroyed the value of previously coveted trophies. To make a bad thing worse, Expansive Worlds continue to let it happen. Now, nearly a year without substantial content and zero communication from the dev team leaves the game in a sad and steril state. Just sad to see.

theHunter: Call of the Wild is about the best hunting game I've ever played. But that says more about the genre than it does about the game. It's pretty realistic, in most ways. It's enjoyable. But it's never particularly "fun" and ultimately what it emulates best are the most boring and aggravating parts of real life hunting. It's very, very slow. It's very plodding. The game gives you too many hunting aids and QoL tools while still then making it really frustrating to successfully find prey. Of particular annoyance is that unless you have a really beefy system, there is an awfully low render distance. Meaning you can't make much usage of blinds or elevating to scope down animals far away.

Instead you spend most of the game slowly crouching towards noises or tracks and hoping you get a shot off before the animal runs. And this wouldn't be so bad, because it's not like standing still and waiting in a tower for two hours would be fun. But there could certainly be challenges or opportunities to stop at cliff edges or vistas and pan around for game.

The animal models aren't all that highly detailed and their movement behavior looks genuinely PS2 quality (the animals only look any good when they're still). The guns are well modeled and the skybox looks quite good. Textures on the land are a bit shitty which is a shame since you spend most of the game zoomed in on it. But it'd be forgivable if the hunting was more fun.

The accuracy and variety of guns are a definite plus. There's also a real wide variety in huntable game which is also a huge plus. There's a ton of DLC which is all very reasonably priced, and if you're enjoying the game that's a major plus. The lodge is a definite bonus too, though I wish there was more you could do in it and with it (as it stands it's basically the same as the Hitman syndicates house). I wish there were more challenges like kill some number of animals in a day or at a certain time. And ways to facilitate those. Just anything to help gamify and speed the game up more.

Really, if you play for about 3-5 hours you'll have seen everything the game has to offer. The core gameplay loop never really changes at all. It's not a bad experience. It's just not engaging enough to make you feel like you gotta stick around longer. Took me about 10 hours to nearly perfect the lodge on the first map, and I felt almost no desire to bother with the second map. I fired up the second map, had a romp and then felt like I had my fill. The game treadmill just isn't fun enough to keep running on it.