Singleplayer. Offline.
I am very wary of any game with a library of DLCs as a potential money grabbing scheme. I got this one for just over $1 on sale added a hunting dog DLC, a quad bike DLC, a tent DLC, modern rifles DLC and the Silver Ridge Peaks DLC for a total cost of around $6. The salami slicing of the DLC money grabbing strategy is very obvious even on sale and the $1 for the base game is an obvious “hook”.
The base rifles in the core game are weak and even with a 90% hit rate only yielded about 20% vital organs hits required for a kill. The quad bike is so noisy its mostly useless. The hunting dog DLC has a single dog in it, and you must purchase another if you want another dog. The dog biscuits cost in game, $4000 per 25 pack at a cost of IG$160 per biscuit, while a silver rated kill will yield IG$ of $800 to $1000 on average which means the dog will never get biscuits, simply to expensive. You need the IG money for ammo (IG$700-IG$1000 for 10 rounds of mid-range ammo).
Only 10 spaces for trophy animals saves so buy another DLC for trophies or delete the lower rated potential trophies (I delete all but the best silver or higher). You seldom have money for taxidermy in any case.
Your noise level on walking is extremely high, jogging is almost the same noise level as a quad bike, stalking is still noisy and only leopard crawling is silent. Binoculars are weaker than reading glasses. I can see animals with my naked eye and when looking through the binoculars, looking the animal in the eye, still cannot “spot” the animal to mark it for a shot. Marking an animal lasts only about 2 seconds. Animals flee at the slightest noise, or sight, or smell and tracking them is useless as they will run or trot while you will spook them using anything other than leopard crawling. Crawling is slower than leopard crawling. So, the best way to get kills is to jog until you get the odd stalking opportunity or just hit them in the run in a “gun and run” strategy which is absurd for a hunting game. Males are mostly hidden behind females, so you spook the females before you get a shot at a male for trophy animals. Else you just collect low score female kills. Stalking an animal could easily waste up to an hour in real time so it’s only worth doing for real good-looking trophy or “medal” animals. Ambushing is an even bigger waste of time you could sit in ambush for hours without any animal showing up at a designated and timed spot and, more often than not, only females will pitch. You also need expensive bait and lures to make this work and another few DLCs to expand that feature. There is no bait in the base game so you must buy a bait/feeder DLC for that kind of ambush. Water holes are better once you have the drinking spots marked.
Want better odds, buy more DLCs
You only get around 8 animals to hunt per reserve and hunting level one animals are often a negative cost game. Shoot them with arrows sometimes work. I leopard crawled into a rafter of turkeys at night with the basic bow and slaughtered them but then a bear and a moose spawned in the same space forcing me to use the handgun and chasing off the turkeys, a cheap strategy.
Often, missions are absurd asking for animal hunts in areas where the animal is extremely scarce or sanitised for the mission. They like asking for coyote kills and then disappear all the coyotes wasting hours of your time searching for an opportunity, hiding them away just out of reach or just behind the next map contour, rock or tree. The coyote missions are absolutely designed to waste endless time. Then there is also the 2 meters teleport of a targeted animal as you line up a shot. With only 8 animals to hunt, missions are very similar and repetitive or silly like taking photos or searching for lost stuff in a hunting game. The missions soon become absurd given the limitations of the core game. Leopard crawl under the belly of a bull moose and shoot out the left testicle with an ash bow and traditional arrows. I exaggerate but not by much, kill two coyotes, at night with a legal kill around Lake Leviathan is a sample. Missions would also be much easier if you would just buy a few more DLCs for better equipment, or feeders, or bait, or better lures.
Then there are the animal specialities. See an animal through the binoculars, “spot” them and they start running immediately. Mission animals suddenly become immortal especially moose cows. Animals almost always hiding behind trees, rocks or in the dip. Moose or bears spawning where you aim to hunt mission animals to attack you in designated “need” spaces for the mission animals.
Changes in one reserve to the next reserve are mostly skin changes with the base formula remaining mostly the same thus the experience does not change materially from one reserve to another. Bison = Moose, Black Bear = Wild boar, Turkey = Pheasant, etc.
The Hunter, Call of the Wild has a few moments and is fun sometimes, but the overall experience is very disappointing. The time wasting and the annoying elements eat away at the gaming value but in the end the extreme limitations in the core game and game thesis (hunting for the sake of trophies) is a failure. It is soon boring, a grind to get better hunter stats, upgrade equipment locked behind massive tedious progression requirements, purposeless missions and a hunting experience at a snail’s pace. There is none of the excitement of real life hunting, only tedious canned hunting at its worst. I really tried to get with the game. I've got 156 harvests, 12 gold, 53 silver, 42 bronze and 384m as longest shot. I will not finish the game, there simply is no advanture left, and not much to start off with. I will certainly not be buying any other DLCs.
