There’s nothing stopping you from just walking around too: with trees rustling, birds chirping and – although I’d describe myself as firmly anti-rain in games, generally -gentle rain falling, theHunter manages to absolutely nail the feeling of being in the middle of a forest.Ĭompared to the all-action blasting of a Call of Duty or even recent favourite Trepang2, theHunter is a lovely way to disengage and relax in a digital wilderness. The fun of theHunter isn’t in the kill but the slow familiarity you gain with your rifle and the tradecraft you pick up as you traipse around the different areas.
Often you’re just left alone with your thoughts and some light chat, with the occasional crack of distant gunfire as one of your pals makes a shot.Ĭrucially, that loud shot at the end is a nice reward if you’re that way inclined, but it’s not essential. Clever girl.Īll of this is doable in co-op too with several friends trawling the map, but it’s rare that you’ll ever spend any real time with your co-op partners. The end result is that you need a brain to play theHunter – satisfaction is hard won, and it’s not uncommon, especially on some of the game’s harder DLC maps, to spend an hour traipsing after an animal only to lose it in the forest, or find out that it’s actually been stalking you, seconds before it pounces and mauls your face off. As killing an animal with more than two bullets hurts your score, you spend a lot of time puzzling things out. For many animals, the FPS staple of aiming for the head is actually a mistake here as many animal skulls are durable – instead, you’re aiming to put a round through the lung, often a clean kill but almost impossible to judge at 100+ metres. There’s a slight art to this in that if you want to kill something like a bear you’ll need to think about where your round is landing. Credit: Expansive Worlds.įinally, there’s the killing part.
Once this is done, you move into a stalking phase where you’ll try to hunt down the animal while also making sure the animals don’t hear, see or smell you – theHunter could be one of the only stealth games to bring in smell as a factor. There’s a few distinct phases – first you’ll walk around the woods listening intently and keeping an eye out for tracks. Animals, as long as they’re not the bastard dobermans in Tomb Raider 2’s Venice level, get a pass in my book.īut regardless of your feelings about hunting, there’s no denying that theHunter presents a pretty accurate depiction of it. This sounds weird, because I have put several thousand hours into shooters at this point and have probably killed hundreds of thousands of AI and player-controlled opponents, but it feels more fair when they also have guns.
Hit Reload is a weekly column on everything first-person shooter.