theHunter: Call of the Wild Is Free On Epic

Monday, Rockstar said sorry and Blizzard has a sale. Tuesday, another survival game is in early access, Hitman 3 preps for a second year, an interesting indie game got a release date, and soon you’ll be trucking in Montana. Wednesday, you can get real medieval on some grass, Tekken 7 is still selling well, and Rocket Racoon got a side gig. Soon you’ll be able to listen to Cyndi Lauper on the Switch, Steam is doing a sale (as is Epic), and that Dragon Ball survival-thing finally got a gameplay trailer.

Onto the Epic Games Store and what is available throughout this week: A free thing that doesn’t seem to matter much, and a hunting game. Let’s deal with the first thing. Antstream Arcade and the Epic Welcome Pack gives you 1,090 gems. It is a free-to-play kind of thing where you pay for gems and get to play arcade games, and the reason I don’t care so much about that is simply the fact I own some of these games. Metal Slug, Monkey Island 2 (not an arcade game), Pac-Man, Worms, Samurai Shodown, and so on, are not hard games to own and I do, so why would I use this system? That’s what I don’t understand about it.

Why would you advance beyond the tripe that was basically a rigged carney game with pixels, then actively try to regress away from that? I don’t see the benefits of this streaming service kick that everyone seems to be on. It has one mini-benefit and that’s how you don’t need the console or the game taking up space. After picking up 80 books this week, I might have a bit less space, sure, but I have more than enough room to own these games digitally. So again, I don’t get the point here.

Moving on to something I didn’t play this week but I know well, theHunter: Call of the Wild. Of course, Call of the Wild is a bit rough, but all these aspirational simulators are and if that isn’t a backhanded compliment, I don’t know what is. As I slightly hinted towards earlier this week when reviewing Open Country, there are better hunting simulators out there than what I was reviewing at the time. While this is that better option, I still don’t see that appeal. Think of Call of the Wild like a good cut of meat, there is no extra fat around the edges and it is cooked well. It knows what it wants to be and does it the best it can, which is another backhanded compliment.

I still think games like Far Cry and Red Dead Redemption benefit more from these superfluous mechanics rather than focusing a whole game around them. Of course, that’s more of a personal thing, but when role-playing as someone tramping through some woods, I’d rather have guns that feel better than a majority of these smaller titles. As much as I like a smaller, almost double-A, take on these strange niches like hunting simulators, there is almost always something off. Don’t expect billions of dollars to have been pumped into Call of the Wild, it’s not that type of game.

All this week you can pick up theHunter: Call of the Wild & the Epic Welcome Pack for Antstream Arcade until the 2nd of December. Up next week is an odd mix of indie and whatever the kids think is good. You’ll be able to pick up Dead by Daylight, an asymmetrical survival horror game that plainly just doesn’t interest me in the slightest. “Oh, but you can play with friends!” Who? I am not the biggest fan of multiplayer, that’s why I lit up like a Christmas tree at While True: Learn () a game I was given a key for back when it was released. I somewhat enjoyed it for its puzzle aspect and also severely hated feeling stupid. It’s great!