The Hunter

By Will Herring
March 17, 2009 15:58 PM PST
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A beautiful and realistic experience from the ground up, The Hunter isn't just a game for enthusiasts of the genre, much less fans of the sport. It's a title that embraces the love that developer Avalanche Studios feels for the game, and passes it on to its subscribers with grace, class, and unmatched authenticity.

Now, before I get started, let me make a few things perfectly clear: I've never been a fan of hunting, tracking, or even camping. The bugs, the guns, the sun beating against my pale Irish skin... just not my scene. Now, this may seem like an odd start to a review for a game entitled The Hunter, but let me get to my second point before you cast any judgment. While I've never been wildly enthused by the real life act of hunting, much less movie theatre arcade buck hunting simulations, I also can't think of another game in recent memory where I've sat in waiting for literally hours upon hours at a time, eyes muddled as the sun rises, binoculars a keyboard stroke away -- all in hopes of just catching a glimpse of a buck. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that as soon as I stepped foot in the universe of The Hunter, I was hooked.

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Like No Other

The Hunter sticks you in the shoes of a user-created game hunter, supplying you with a randomly generated avatar and a beginner's hunting license. From here on out, it's entirely up to you how you want to play the game. The hunting itself takes place in a separate downloadable client, while the meat of the game -- the community aspect -- is all neatly dispersed through The Hunter's website. Outside of the client, players can create FaceBook-esque home pages, where they can put on display their most prominent trophies, share statistics, and update hunter's journals. It's the community aspect that this creates that really impressed me with The Hunter, as I found tips on where to hunt, how to track, and even what supplies to bring with me into the wilderness all by simply clicking about and befriending other players. The community aspect isn't limited to just the user profile pages, but fansites and forums are constantly abuzz with tips and tricks, not to mention footage and screen captures from other hunters' excursions. I remember finding one person's YouTube recording of watching a white-tailed buck in its natural habitat, moving majestically as the wind blew the grass around it. Its experiences like this that are truly reward enough for tracking these animals.

When you do decide to hit the Evergreen Hunting Reserve, you're in for quite a treat. You begin your adventure by selecting your weapons, ammunition, lures -- even canned smoke so you can tell which way the wind's blowing. After selecting a drop-point, the game is pretty much your oyster. Flexible to all styles of hunting, you can spend hours tracking animal droppings and noises, or lay low and try to lure animals to your location -- it's all up to you. The feeling of successfully tracking my first deer, even if it was about 3 AM in the morning, was fantastic; hours of watching for buck tracks, using my HuntersMate GPS system to analyze and locate the creature's last known location... when I finally came eye to eye with the beast, it was simply fantastic, and a genuine experience that I haven't felt in a game of any genre for quite some time.

Lock and Load

While The Hunter indeed requires a bit of patience and time to be set aside for it, I can't stress the idea that it's an incredibly rich, diverse and original experience from top to bottom. If you have, have ever had, or even have never had any interest in hunting, just like yours truly, I'm still going to recommend giving The Hunter a spin. And what do you have to lose -- I did mention it was free, right?

PROS: Beautiful graphics; amazing community dynamic; rewarding hunts
CONS: Large difficulty curve; not for the impatient; slightly buggy client