Probably the only notable achievement of this game should be noticed right out of the gate, in that it successfully is the first game to grab the title of Hunting Simulator. Decades of attempts at hunting games have come and gone, and no one had the foresight to name their game with such stunning simplicity. Sadly, aside from that the game not only manages to stumble, but pretty much fall all over itself on every goal that should be set within both the genre and video games in general.
Check out our stream of Hunting Simulator embedded below. We eventually blast the crap out of turkey with a shotgun.
The first offense that the title boasts is that it fails to be a good lost in the woods simulator. Any hunting game worth its while needs to at the very minimum do a decent job of rendering the environment in a way that is pleasant to look at. The purpose of this is because the player isn’t going to be spending a ton of time actually gazing down the barrel of a rifle at game, but instead enjoying a fictional rendition of areas of the world they may never be able to travel to. Hunting simulator not only manages to fail at this, but makes the outdoors feel both more boring than they already are, but blander than a paper bag in an unlit room.
The other fault is that the game isn’t enjoyable to play. There is a weird limbo that the game seems to be stuck in between trying to be an arcade style hunting shooter, like a big buck title or something from a Cabela series, and an open world simulation. This middle ground is murky at best, and a toxic swamp where everything is dead at its worst. The game awards the player points for kill shots but mess it up and you have pretty much destroyed the kill and lose massive points. The game wants players to track the animals, which are glowing points on the world, but vague at best directions are given. The entire experience ends up feeling frustrating and stupid.
If there is someone out there that simply needs to have a hunting game on the Switch, they should probably wait for something else. I am normally a fan of terrible games, and can find enjoyment in some of the most awful things ever made (check out our YouTube channel for proof), but Hunting Simulator manages to ruin even this for me. This game was so bad that I couldn’t even enjoy it in spite of itself, and that might takes a lot for a game to do.