TheHunter: Call of the Wild
Expansive Worlds · Shooter, Simulation, Survival
Overview
Discover an authentic hunting game in a dynamic open world that reacts to your every move. Track prey, face unscripted encounters, and master the hunt alone or with friends.
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Discover an authentic hunting game in a dynamic open world where the wild reacts to your every move. Master the hunt by tracking prey and staying prepared for unscripted encounters. Explore on your own or with friends.
Explore an authentic open world hunting experience, set in a dynamic environment teeming with life. The wild offers constant, unscripted encounters, continuously responding to your presence.
A LIVING, BREATHING WILDERNESS
Journey across the rugged Layton Lake District in North America or explore the leafy European landscapes of Hirschfelden. Discover a diverse range of regions, each home to its own unique flora and fauna. Experience the dynamics of complex animal behavior, changing weather events, full day and night cycles, highly realistic acoustics, and scents carried by the wind.
YOUR HUNT, YOUR CHOICE
Choose your rifle, sidearm, shotgun, or bow with care, matching your loadout and ammunition to your prey. From jackrabbits and mallards to black bears, elk, and moose, every hunt demands its own approach. Read unique animal behaviors, adapt to the environment, and make your shot count.
HONOR THE HUNT
Every hunt has a unique story to tell, and some you might want to remember forever. Display your most prized harvests in your trophy lodge, and preserve those memories for years to come.
ALWAYS EVOLVING
Developed in close collaboration with the community and shaped by years of player feedback, theHunter: Call of the Wild keeps evolving to offer an authentic hunting experience. With regular updates of free and paid content, including new reserves and equipment, the hunt you return to is never quite the one you left.
TOGETHER IN THE WILD
Experience online multiplayer for up to eight players in breathtaking hunting reserves. Collaborate and strategize with friends, or compete to take down the most impressive harvest. You can access any paid DLC reserve as long as one member of your hunting party owns it.
EXPAND YOUR HUNTING EXPERIENCE
Take your journey further with a collection of paid content. Choose from 18 global reserves, stretching from frozen northern land, to dry African plains to dense jungle rivers. Experience new ways of hunting with equipment like precision modern rifles or classic black-powder weapons, and adapt to the trail with ATVs, mobile tents, ground blinds, and hunting dogs. The path ahead is as wide as you choose to make it.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT10,000 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Players recommend theHunter: Call of the Wild for its open hunting reserves. A quarter of longer reviews (26%) praise how the world looks and sounds. Others write about the slow work of reading tracks, wind and shot placement before a trophy kill (17%), or about how calming it is to play (14%), and 13% mention playing with friends or family. Price comes up often too: reviewers describe picking up the base game on sale for a few dollars, and say new reserves and animals have kept arriving for years.
DLC is where the criticism concentrates. 35% of longer reviews mention it and 17% criticize it, angry that the ATV, tents, ground blinds, tree stands and dogs are sold separately and that, as they describe it, the base game comes with only two reserves. A smaller group (8%) answers that the add-ons are optional and cheap on sale. Bugs and technical problems (15%) are the other main complaint, raised most by long-time players: deployables vanishing, crashes, stuck missions and multiplayer sync errors. The slow pace divides people by taste, and newcomers are the ones who most often call it a walking simulator.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Beautiful reserves, scenery and soundHigh
26% of longer reviews mention the graphics, landscapes or views. Players describe the reserves as varied and real-looking, from snowy taiga to savanna and Himalayan foothills, and some say they walk around just to look, or stop to take screenshots. "The maps are gorgeous, hands down." Sound design and ambient audio, animal calls included, get their own mentions in 4%. The criticism here is narrow: some say the engine shows its age at distance, and a few want animals to render farther out (see the frustrations below).
The stalk, the shot and the trophyHigh
Following tracks, playing the wind and your scent, choosing ammunition and putting a shot in the lungs or heart: 17% of longer reviews talk about this loop. The payoff they describe is the trophy system (9%), meaning diamond racks, rare furs and, for the dedicated, Great Ones, which come up in 3% of longer reviews, often alongside the word grind. "Sit back, relax, take in the beautiful vistas, and shoot animals through the lungs." The same loop draws complaints when a well-placed shot does not drop the animal (see below).
A relaxing game to unwind withHigh
Relaxing, calm, chill and peaceful are the words in 14% of longer reviews. Players say they put on a podcast and wander, play it after work or after competitive shooters, and like that nothing rushes them. "I find this game relaxing and soothing. I wander through the woods, and it sets my mind at ease." Several add that the calm breaks when a bear, wolf pack or charging buffalo appears: "Hunter Call of the Wild is the most peaceful game that has ever stressed me out."
Hunting with friends and familyMedium
Friends, co-op or multiplayer come up in 13% of longer reviews, often with a named partner, parent or child. Players like that guests can hunt on a host's reserves: "I appreciate the fact you can visit maps in multiplayer that you don't own the DLC for as it's a great way to try out maps before purchasing them." The downside is reliability, covered under multiplayer problems below.
Cheap to start, with years of added contentMedium
Price comes up in 10% of longer reviews, usually from people who say they bought the base game on sale for a few dollars and got their money's worth. 8% praise the steady stream of new reserves, species, weapons and free updates, and a similar share mention the story missions that give each reserve a purpose. Fans of the missions say they teach each map; a minority find them tedious or report ones that will not complete.
Where players are split
The slow paceMedium
9% of longer reviews call the game slow, boring, tedious or a walking simulator, and 7% describe patience as the point of it. "Definitely takes some time and patience to get used to the more realistic cadence, but I like the slower take a lot." A negative review, after losing a tracked elk to a despawn, summed it up as "Great walking simulator, infuriating hunting game." Players with under 10 hours raise the slow pace more often than everyone else, and several tie it to slow walking speed without the paid ATV.
How realistic it isMedium
15% of longer reviews praise the realism, and real-life hunters among them say it captures the feel of a hunt. A smaller, more critical group (4%) calls it arcade-like, pointing to need zones, fast travel between tents, animals with fixed detection radii and inconsistent ballistics, and some of them name Way of the Hunter as the more realistic option. Others say the balance suits them: "Real-ish is the right word to describe it, rather than realistic."
The learning curveMedium
How hard the game is to learn comes up in 5% of longer reviews. Some say the opening hours are confusing, with little explanation of ammunition classes, weapon ranges or how to find animals, and send newcomers to YouTube guides. Others call it easy to learn and hard to master, a game that improves once the systems click: "But overall, the more you understand the game the more you'll enjoy it."
Performance depends on the machineMedium
Stutter, low frame rates, overheating and the lack of a frame cap are complaints in 4% of longer reviews, some tied to specific patches. A smaller 2% say it runs well on low-end PCs, laptops or the Steam Deck.
What frustrates players
Basic hunting gear sold as DLCHigh
17% of longer reviews criticize the DLC model, and 5% name the ATV. The objection is to which items are paid: the ATV, tents and ground blinds, tree stands and tripods, dogs, lodges, and all but two reserves. Players also note that missions in the base reserves ask for gear that only DLC unlocks. "This game is not feature complete without purchasing DLC." A positive review makes the same point about the ATV: "Locking a basic transportation tool behind a paywall ruins the experience for base-game players." DLC complaints appear in about a fifth of negative longer reviews. Some reviewers both criticize the DLC and call it good value on sale, and defenders say the base maps hold plenty of hunting: "Don't be intimidated by the DLCs, as there's plenty to do on the maps given to you before you'll feel the need to get new ones!" One negative review put the price split this way: "10/10 if you buy it and the dlc's on sale (around $38) but a solid 3/10 if you are looking to spend full price".
Bugs, crashes and lost itemsHigh
15% of longer reviews report technical problems, and bugs appear in about a fifth of negative longer reviews. Players with 100+ hours raise bugs far more often than those under 10 hours. They report weapons that vanish after riding the ATV, tents and tripods disappearing from the world or inventory, missions that will not complete, crashes on launch or when firing, animals floating or stuck in terrain, and occasional save or progress loss. One player lost a full set of tents after leaving a friend's server: "every single one of my tents disappeared and were not returned to my inventory." Several veterans say the same bugs have survived years of DLC releases.
Huge install size and forced downloadsMedium
Storage is the complaint in 4% of longer reviews. Players say the game installs every reserve and pack whether you own it or not, so those with only the base game describe installs over 100GB and large updates for content they cannot use. "Please for the love of god let me download the game without downloading every single locked DLC map." Complaints about big update downloads clustered in September 2026.
Clunky store and inventory menusMedium
3% of longer reviews criticize the interface, and their requests are specific: show which ammunition fits which weapon, let players buy more than ten rounds at once, and add search and sorting to a storage screen that fills with dozens of weapons. "Why is the bullet purchase limit always 10 rounds?" Another: "This is not some advanced quality-of-life feature. This is basic information in a hunting game."
Animals that shrug off good shotsLow
In 2% of longer reviews, animals survive headshots or vital hits, run hundreds of metres after a lung shot, or leave tracks that end or despawn. "Head shots arent a thing." Short reviews turn it into a running joke about a turkey surviving a magnum round or a moose that will not go down.
Animals that spook too easilyLow
2% of longer reviews say animals detect the player from implausible distances, even when crawling with scent cover, while others walk right past. Several call the detection inconsistent.
Multiplayer sync problems and cheatersLow
About 1% of longer reviews report multiplayer failures: sync errors, hosts dropping, structures lost on disconnect, and waterfowl hunting that stops working in multiplayer, reported from August 2025 through June 2026. "Duck and Geese hunting is broken in multiplayer." A similar share mention modded or trolling players in public lobbies, which some say a server hop fixes.
Short animal render distanceLow
About 1% of longer reviews say animals only appear within a few hundred metres, which undercuts long-range scouting on open maps. "Animals only appear once you're within a certain range, which breaks the immersion."
Weapon sway and short breath holdLow
About 1% of longer reviews object to weapon sway, and some say a past change made it much worse. "The weapon sway, for instance, got nerfed so hard, it's almost impossible to maintain any level of steadiness, and the breath hold lasts for .7 seconds before going bonkers on you."
Features players keep asking forLow
3% of longer reviews ask for additions: suppressors, trail cameras, more species and continents, crossbows, swimming and horses. A smaller group wants crossplay with console friends: "Its an amazing game but theres one massive problem there is no crossplay and thats the thing that is needed most"
3. The player conversation
Most reviews are short, and the short ones are warm: one-liners such as "relaxing", "best hunting game" or "good game", and jokes about chasing a wounded animal for an hour, told with affection. Criticism lives in the longer reviews, which still lean positive. Praise for the reserves and the hunt turns up in negative reviews as well as positive ones. The arguments are over how much DLC you need, whether the slow pace is relaxing or dull, and how realistic the game should be.
Who raises what depends on experience. Newcomers with under 10 hours write most about the slow start, getting lost, and finding the ATV and tents behind DLC. Players with 100+ hours write more about trophies and Great Ones, and also more about bugs, multiplayer reliability and the inventory screens, problems that only show up after long use. DLC criticism is spread fairly evenly across playtime groups. Because this slice holds the most recently updated reviews, the dates mostly show when people wrote (sale weeks and update weeks). Specific complaints do cluster around updates, such as reports of stutter after a patch in late October 2025 and of large update downloads in September 2026.
4. What the developers could do
- Move basic hunting gear into the base game. Players name the ATV, tents and ground blinds, and tree stands when they say basic gear should never have been paid, and some base-reserve missions ask for gear only DLC provides.
- Fix the long-running bugs before the next pack. Vanishing weapons after the ATV, disappearing tents and tripods, stuck missions and crashes on firing are the technical problems players report again and again, and veterans say they have outlasted years of releases.
- Let players download only the content they own. Installs over 100GB that include unowned reserves are the reason some players say they stopped playing.
- Rebuild the store and storage screens around ammunition. Players ask to see which ammo fits each weapon, buy more than ten rounds at a time, and search their storage.
- Give newcomers a better start. First-timers report confusion over ammo classes and finding animals, plus slow walking without the paid ATV, and several only enjoyed the game after watching outside guides.
- Make multiplayer sync reliable. Reports of sync failures, lost structures on disconnect and waterfowl hunting broken in multiplayer come from players who mainly play with friends.
- Make shot results consistent. Players accept that a poor shot should mean a long track, but headshots and lung hits that animals shrug off, and tracks that end without explanation, read to them as bugs.
- Extend animal render distance on open maps. Players scouting with binoculars on open terrain say animals appear too late for long-range hunting.
