It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. What have I been playing when I’m not playing Kerbal Space Program or Skyrim? Quite a few things, actually. Some I have lots of playtime with but not very much to say about, and others I’ve got very little playtime but could talk your ear off about.
Well, here’s one of the latter: The Hunter. Or, theHunter rather, which is easier to search for on Google as the former leads you primarily to a Willem Dafoe movie.
What’s theHunter? It’s a hunting game. As in you have a gun, there is a landscape with wildlife in it, and you’re to shoot the wildlife. It’s controlled through a first-person point of view, there’s lots of stuff in it and things to shoot, and none of that is anything I really want to talk about. You’ve seen one FPS, you’ve seen them all.
Guess what? It’s also ” ‘free’ to play.” Yes, those are nested commas. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I’ve already written about this particular awful practice in gaming. I also said that it’s OK if done well. This game doesn’t – and what hurts the most is the fact that the game is actually really, really good. It’s just not good enough to spite its payment model. So, what sins does it commit? Let me listify them.
1. It’s subscription-based. You can’t buy the game. You can merely rent it. No, it’s not an MMO. For $34.99 USD you have a game that you can’t play a year from now. Great.
“Buy the game? Why would you ever want to do that?!?”
2. Free accounts can’t scale up. In Dead Rising 2, I’ve unlocked all sorts of things just by playing the game. In theHunter, as a free account player you get: One gun (a deer rifle with a scope, thankfully you don’t have to buy basic ammo, just special bullets), a basic deer call, binoculars and a camera. Buying guns requires in-game currency that can only be bought with real-life currency. You can also only hunt one animal – mule deer. Trying to shoot at a pheasant gets a “you don’t have a license to shoot this” message rather than a gunshot.
Sneakily though free players DO have a license to hunt cottontail rabbits. What we don’t have is a gun that the game won’t chastise us for using to shoot rabbit. Really, game?
3. Everything costs money. Microtransactions go with the territory of a free-to-play game, but this game takes it to extremes. Want to wear something different? It’ll cost ya. Different gun, bow, scope, ammo? Yup. Bear/deer bait or other consumable items? Absolutely! Licenses to hunt different beasts? That too – and they’re time-based. About the only thing the game doesn’t charge – and this is bizarre – traveling to different hunting lodges, lands etc. These are all open for exploration from the start, even for free accounts.
All this makes it sound like I hate the game. Not so! I merely despise it. In spite of all the above, there are a few good things.
What’s good about the game?
IT IS GORGEOUS.
Seriously. It runs quickly on old-ish hardware, sounds amazing, and the controls are superb. It is a great game hobbled by a horrendous payment model.
To be honest, I sometimes load the game up just to take a virtual nature walk, shooting animals that I’m not allowed to hunt with my camera instead. During that time, I forget about the nasty charging practices, the subscription that I refuse to pay or the fact that there’s data on my hard drive for a whole game that simply refuses to let me play it unless I pay its ransom. And that’s a shame.
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