TheHunter: Call of the Wild Review: A Forest That Breathes, a Score That Holds at 7.4

The first red deer is the whole pitch. You push through brush in an open world built by Expansive Worlds, the crown of the animal comes into view, and the game asks you to feel something before you pull the trigger. That is the promise of theHunter: Call of the Wild, and it is a promise the game mostly keeps.

Trailer, via Expansive Worlds.

Expansive Worlds Built a Forest That Breathes

TheHunter: Call of the Wild came out in 2017. Expansive Worlds developed it, Avalanche Studios published it, and it has since been carried forward to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. That is a long life for a hunting sim, and the platform spread is the reason it still finds players.

The game is filed under shooter, simulator, sport, strategy and adventure, which sounds like a genre list assembled by committee. In practice it is a hunting game, and the store-page summary is unusually honest about what that means: you are “not just a visitor in this world, you are a living and breathing part of it.”

That line is the design thesis. The world is meant to feel teeming with life, from the animals to the leaves rustling above you as you stalk. The animals are described as majestic and true-to-life. Whether that reads as marketing or as a mission statement depends on how much patience you bring.

You Can Hunt Alone or Bring Friends

The modes are single player, multiplayer and co-operative. You can hunt on your own or join up with friends. That flexibility matters more than it might sound, because a hunting sim lives or dies on whether the quiet stretches feel like atmosphere or like dead air. Bringing another player changes the math on both.

The core loop is stalking. You track, you wait, you move through an open world that is doing its own thing regardless of your plans. The first-person perspective keeps you low and close to the ground, which is the right call for a game about sightlines and sound. Nothing here is abstracted into a top-down map of icons. You are in the brush.

The Crown Comes Through the Brush

The summary saves its best image for last. You finally spot the crown of your first red deer through the brush, and the feeling, the game says, is indescribable. That is a bold claim to put in your own marketing copy, and it is also the exact moment the whole genre has to earn.

TheHunter: Call of the Wild earns it more often than not. The animals are the point, and the game treats them as the point. There is no cartoon villainy in the hunt, no arcade scoreboard screaming at you. There is a deer, and there is the space between you and it.

Where the game stumbles is in the same place every sim stumbles: the pace. The atmosphere that makes the first red deer land is the same atmosphere that can make the twentieth stalk feel like a commute. Expansive Worlds built a world worth walking through. It did not fully solve the problem of what you do when the walking is all there is.

What the Aggregate Score Measures

The published critical score is 7.4 out of 10, drawn from an aggregate of five outlets. That number is a fair read on a game that is very good at one specific thing and content to be merely competent at the rest.

Here is the case for the score, ranked by what actually moves the needle:

1. The animals and the open world — true-to-life, atmospheric, and the reason to play.
2. Co-op and multiplayer — the mode that turns a slow game into a shared one.
3. The first-person stalking loop — tense when it works, tedious when it does not.
4. The genre sprawl — shooter, simulator, sport, strategy, adventure — which promises more than any single system delivers.

The sprawl is the tell. A game that lists five genres is usually a game that has not decided what it is. TheHunter: Call of the Wild has decided. It is a hunting game with a strong sense of place, and the extra labels are noise.

A Score That Holds at 7.4

The 7.4 is not a knock. It is an accurate ceiling for a game that nails the moment it was built around and then asks you to keep manufacturing that moment on your own. The first red deer is real. The hundredth is a test of how much you love the brush.

If you want a sim that respects the animal, the sightline and the silence, this is the one. If you want a game that fills every minute, it is not. The score holds at 7.4 out of 10.

Numbers and Credits

• Title: theHunter: Call of the Wild
• Release year: 2017
• Developer: Expansive Worlds
• Publisher: Avalanche Studios
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC (Microsoft Windows)
• Modes: Single player, multiplayer, co-operative
• Perspective: First person
• Published critical score: 7.4/10, an aggregate of five outlets
• Clay Tribune score: 7.4/10

co-op · Expansive Worlds · game review · hunting sim · open world · theHunter Call of the Wild