Hunting Simulator 2 Review: Missed The Mark

Review based on patch 1.06.

After burning out on master rank Monster Hunter World, I decided to try a different kind of hunting game. One in a genre I have never actually tried before. Most hunting games seem to be "arcady" like Duck Hunt, or whatever Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is suppose to be. But Hunting Simulator 2 actually tries to simulate real-world hunting and hunting ethics. The graphics could look better, but are fine for what they are; about what I expected from a niche hunting game.

There is a good amount of visual variation and elevation between the various environments. Occasionally it will rain when you visit a map, but otherwise there is no dynamic day/night or weather cycle. The same handful of animals also appear in nearly every location because North America and Europe share a Holarctic realm, so there is a lot of overlap in the types of animals present. It would have been nice to have South American, Australian, African, or Asian regions with their distinct fauna, but that probably wasn't in the budget. The animal animations are also kinda basic. There is no animation or indication whatsoever for when a shot connects with an animal, which got me fined for "excessive shots" because I couldn't tell if I had hit the animal or not, and I wasn't sure if the game expected me to 'mercy kill' it like in Red Dead Redemption 2. Injured animals also just kind of stand still for a few seconds before running away and then limp indefinitely. Possibly an animation glitch, but a lot of the animal movements were funny like that and don't react to the environment like you would expect them too. There are no herds, no foraging behaviors, and predators leisurely hang out with their prey.

Some of the animal models could use work, such as the spindly back legs on the bison.

There are three geographic locations - Colorado, Texas, and Europe - each with two hunting grounds to choose from. Hunting ethics are stressed in this game, so you will have to buy licenses for each animal in each region. Poaching, taking excessive shots, killing female animals, and abandoning kills are all fineable offenses. Like in real life, you have to use the correct weapon type for the different animal sizes, and the game will flash a warning when you are using the wrong caliber or lack the required license. Weapons and scopes (caliber and reticle) can be selected and changed, as can your clothes, various gear items, and which breed of hunting dog (tracker, pointer, or retriever) will accompany you. I really like the idea of having a dog that can flush birds from ground-cover, follow a trail, and retrieve smaller game. Blood trails are hard to see, especially in thick brush, and are not usually worth the tedium of following, so the dog could theoretically remedy this. However, the canine will start following a trail and then stop unexpectedly, or start following the hunter instead of the trail. You have to spend a few hours leveling the dog up before it's of any real use on a hunt and I eventually just gave up on it. Most of the time I could follow the trail faster than the dog and without spooking every animal in the area along the way.

The thing I disliked the most was how sparsely populated the massive maps were. I spent several real-world hours walking around looking for something to do, wondering to myself why I was playing this game instead of doing something more productive. There are post-apocalyptic wasteland games more alive than this. After 20 to 30 hours it got a little better when I figured out where the animals spawned-in, so I wasn't traveling around empty voids anymore. I get that it is suppose to be realistic, but this game can be so obsessed with capturing the realism of hunting that it forgets to be a video game. I don't regret my experience with this game, but Red Dead Redemption 2 did a better job in my opinion of balancing realism versus fun while still giving me a fuller, more rewarding digital hunting experience.

A trophy room showcases your progression through the bestiary and acts as your base in-between hunts. Most of the taxidermy is in static poses and head mounts. You do not get to choose what goes where or what poses the full-body mounts are in. There is one trophy slot for each animal with no way to store multiples of the same species. So for "Legendary" (unique coat pattern) variants you will have to choose between the large normal-colored specimen you have or discarding it for a smaller version with rare colors.

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