Way of the Hunter Review: I enjoyed playing this vast open-world hunting game

Open world games are usually within survival and action-adventure elements genres. As someone who has been playing open world games like Ark, Conan: Exiles, Grand Theft Auto V and Cyberpunk 2077, playing this latest game from Nine Rocks Games THQ Nordic is somewhat of a breath of fresh air.

Way of the Hunter is a hunting game that offers vast open-world environments, realistic rifle handling, a story campaign, and natural animal behaviour. It offers co-op multiplayer and also promises players an engaging end-game. In this article, I am going to walk you through my gameplay experience, and give you my recommendations.

System Requirements

MINIMUM:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: 64bit OS – Windows 10
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 3100 / Intel Core i3-8100
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: GeForce GTX 960 / Radeon R9 380
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 15 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: 64bit OS – Windows 10
• Processor: Intel i7 quad-core
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVidia GTX 2070 Super 8GB VRAM
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 15 GB available space

Played on

Stunning Audiovisual Experience

Lush Environment and Animal Sense + Behaviour

Way of the Hunter drops you in one of the 2 open-world locations of the game. According to THQ Nordic, they are introducing two handcrafted locations that measures 55 square miles each: Pacific Northwest and Translyvania. Each location where you’ll mostly hunt is tethered to an ecosystem that the developers created that will ultimately define your gameplay experience. I’ll talk more about it later.

The game looks stunning. While you will mostly play this game by yourself, the environment will make you feel otherwise. It feels alive with its lush fauna and flora. If you’re an avid fan of open-world games, you’ll realized that everything is made from ground up because a lot of portions of the environment did not give a feeling of familiarity. There are times when you’ll feel like you’re playing game that’s made with an entirely different game engine.

Each portion of the map, at least from the places I’ve been to, feels different and new. Everything is dynamic, including how the animals react to every action you make. Each step you make will make a sound, and will affect how the animals will react to you. While this may seem like a cookie-cutter formula for hunting games, WOTH has created a natural animal behaviour system that add value to the game’s overall gameplay.

Sound is Key

Sound is an important aspect of the game. It allows you, as the hunter, to get a sense of the whereabouts of your prey. If you hear a duck, it just means that there’s literally a paddling or plump of ducks nearby. If you’re hunting one, then you better ready yourself and your trusty Bonser & Klein Standard shotgun. If you find yourself on a nearby river stream, then it’s likely to be a possible feeding ground of red foxes or deer.

The game also gives users a way to further amplify or hyper focus their attention to the sound of animals. This is what WOTH calls “Hunter Sense”. Call it “cheats” but this is one of the features that separates this game beyond other hunting games like Call of the Wild and Cabelas series. It gives hunters additional binocular identification, interaction highlighting, extra information in scope, animal signs and more.

Realism is a double-edged sword

Patience is the way of the hunter

Nine Rocks Games made this game to be a hyper realistic hunting game. It packs plenty of features that definitely adds realism to the game, which means that this is not an arcade-type hunting game. You need to embrace the value of patience, and if there’s one takeaway from my gameplay, this value defines the way of a hunter. A single mistake of firing bullet from your rifle can drastically change the course of your gameplay, which can push you to pack up and go back to your lodge and call it a day.

Do not expect this game to be easy and quick. As the game involves a complex ecosystem and gives high regard on natural animal behaviour, expect your game to be both long but satisfying. The game gives you audio-visual clues to help you hunt, but you have to be prepared with the requirement of really learning and understanding the animals you’re hunting. While the game offers story progression, it encourages players to freely explore locations and discover all the wonders it offers.

Guns and Ballistics

Adding to the realism of the game is what Nine Rocks Games refers as “realistic rifle handling”. According to them, they studied each and every rifle included in the game. They pooled active hunters and those who have rich hunting experience to give insights to how each gun weighs, fires, performs, etc. Yes, this means that you cannot just quickly swap from one weapon to another. The game accounts of weight and how weapons are actually swapped in real life. This is not Call of Duty. This is an actual hunting simulator.

From Rifles to Shotguns, the guns in the game are all handcrafted and modelled from the actual guns. The developers even signed a partnership with several companies so they can use the guns’ data and brand. They also partnered with renowned rifle sights company, Leupold.

Sophisticated Trophy System

Way of the Hunter also has a complex Trophy System in place. They decided to mix Bownman and Crocket System and European CIC as bases the games Trophy system. Trophies are designed based on age and fitness. It accounts for genetic potential, which adds to the algorithm of computing for the trophy score. It also gives you a comprehensive ballistics view and your hunt’s specification. This particular feature got me – a newbie – very impressed with so much heart the developers put into this game.

Great Performance on high-end systems

The game supports ultra wide angle, but has locked FOV. According to the developers, they are looking at including a feature to tweak the FOV, which can particularly be very useful especially when driving around. It can also be beneficial for those who have monitors with big screen real estate.

WOTH also gives you advanced video graphics quality presets from Low to Very High Quality. You have the option to further change other advanced settings like view distance, post-processing, shadows, textures, effects, and foliage. The default AA is TAA but you have the option to change it to the less visually appeaking FXAA. There is no way to further adjust the level of anti-aliasing per choice, which is quite a bummer.

Benchmarks

I benchmarked the game in various settings: Very High, High and Low. It performs exceedingly way beyond my expectations on my setup. Its averaging 42.8 to 48.1fps on Very High on the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 with RTX 3080 Mobile GPU and a Huawei Mateview GT.

Recommendation

I recommend Way of the Hunter, whether you’re a newbie or a veteran in this genre. The game fully immerses you into the basics of hunting without overloading your brains. Its enjoyable to play and features a number of amazing features that embraces the old and new presentations of hunting simulator games in the market.

The Way of the Hunter is now available for PhP1,365 on Steam.

Gianfranco Viterbo

Gianfranco is the co-founder of gadgetpilipinas.net. He graduated from Far Eastern University. A Psychology student turned tech-savvy. He's currently the HR Supervisor of Blip Media and one of the content producers of Gadget Pilipinas. He enjoys playing competitive video games and binge-watch American TV series.