Achievement Hunters: you can 100% the game in about 25hrs time, give or take based on RNG, or how fast you manage to beat the level; WARNING: make sure you play it on Hard difficulty as the Easy and Normal difficulty achievements are retroactive, and will unlock upon beating it on Hard, so I don't recommend any difficulty less as you'd be doing it all over again.
Tip for the 'Never seen me coming' achievement: unlock the bow first, don't run too much, use scent killer, and use urine once your target is spotted; once a gun is shot, you are instantly detected.
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The highest difficulty removes advantages, such as showing you where the animals are on the map, taking your compass from the HUD, and you lose the awareness meter that animals have, so you know, like real life where you have to play the wind and be stealthy.
The game has bare-bones mission objectives that quickly become repetitive: click map -> choose gear between 3 different weapons based on game size (including bows once unlocked) -> choose gear for animal -> hunt the animal -> claim it -> do next mission which is another animal on the same biome of map, but maybe you have to kill two of those; pretty much just run around the map, shoot whatever in the head, claim it, and moved on to the next mission.
Each mission gives a description about the particular animal you are hunting, about the biome, how to hunt it, etc, but the only story in this game is the Legendary animals you'll hunt as the last mission on the biome (though not always), so the game is practically a checklist; though I found it funny how the descriptions started out long and actually descriptive, but by the last biome and missions, it was just like a couple sentences long - sometimes the same wording - which gave me a laugh, as it seemed the dev was getting tired of writing.
Once you beat all the missions (or most), you'll unlock the next biome to do another set of missions, but with different animals this time, going through the checklist again until you hit the laid-back, duck-hunt biomes.
Which *QUACKIN* suck - the shotguns in the game for some reason like to shoot 6 inches higher than where you are supposed to aim, so you have to aim lower, blindly firing until you hit something; I'll tell you now, once you unlock the semi-auto, it'll start feeling a bit funner - a bit.
One of the missions: 'A Float Too Much' description is laughable, "Lot's of trees in this spot. Remember to move around and get a better line of sight." - you can only move a few feet in any direction.
There are secondary objectives on some missions for extra points - which are superficial besides being on an online leaderboard, or a stat in your trophy room - such as shoot the animal in the lung, or shoot the animal 150m away; there are also extra 'tags' that pop up during the hunt, telling you to hunt a bonus animal which are called Flash Objectives, but apparently you can just shoot whatever during the hunt and not get in trouble for it.
Points are connected to unlocking equipment, so the more points you earn based on clean kill - heart shot at long distance being the best, with stomach shots negating points - you'll unlock more gear, but as I played not caring about points, I unlocked about 95% of the things before I beat the game anyway.
Weapon choices: various rifles, shotguns, and bows, even a tranquilizer rifle for some reason, even though there's no mission to put something to sleep; like the real world, certain rifles are for certain animals: .22 for rabbits; shotguns for duck, rabbit, turkey, etc; .308 for deer or even moose.
Then you got bow in the form of recurve, compound, and crossbow, which can take all game, with all weapons models looking really nice, especially on missions with lots of lighting, or rain where you can see the droplets on it.
Gear is chosen by you, with gear being things like calls, scent-killer, urine spray, wind-powder, binoculars, range-finders, flashlight, and even night vision and a drone; no mobile treestands, ground blinds, or tripods, but the game will sometimes have treestands that you can get in and hunt from, which usually means that's where the animal is located, so another hint.
Walking in the game is fine, but once you start sprinting diagonally, you'll see the jankiness of it as the person begins to skate, which I guess is a bug carried over from keyboard, but then there's 360° movement on controller, so I don't know - just a bug I suppose; you can also crouch - obviously, for how else are you going to sneak - but you can also go prone, and crawl around.
Though during walking, sometimes you'll snag on things, especially during running, so you'll probably be keeping your finger on the sprint button as it kicks you out of sprint; sometimes it looks like you can walk over rocks, fallen trees, through water, etc, but it won't allow it, becoming a nuisance when you are trekking, so you'll spend time fighting the controls.
3 PoVs: 1st person, 3rd person, and closer 3rd person, but 3rd person aiming goes into first person, except the bows which can be aimed in 3rd person, though the camera seems to block the reticle.
There's a delay in equipment use: pressing the hotkey, it'll take a second or two before it's pulled out, and that's a big issue if you spot a fleeing animal and need to get your gun out, waiting on the delay.
Rabbit tracks are backwards when it comes to analyzing them, as it shows the rabbit running backwards - small issue, but I found it funny - I even found tracks walking up the side of trees once.
Night hunting: like I said before, there's a flashlight and night vision for those hunts, with the first mission being elk, so apparently poaching missions are a thing lol, but for coyotes or something, it's a pretty neat mission idea.
TL;DR - if you get the game cheap, then it's a fun time killer, just don't expect it to be amazing; maybe the second one is though, I just haven't played it yet to find out, but there are still other hunting games out there to check out for better value of your time.
