Way of the Hunter 2 Review – A Promising but Rough Early Access Hunting Sim
I spent hours stalking moose, teaching a dog to track blood trails and wrestling with crashes. Way of the Hunter 2 is gorgeous and promising, but early access kinks — memory leaks, audio glitches and HUD quirks — temper the thrill.
Way of the Hunter 2 pulls you into a cinematic Canadian wilderness where every rustle might be a trophy or a letdown. As a sequel it leans hard into realism: dogs that track, tents for long hunts and detailed lodges to show off antlers. That ambition is its charm — and sometimes its curse — because the Early Access build still shows serious bugs and performance issues alongside lots of smart design choices.
Tracking, Stalking, and the Perfect Shot
Hunting in Way of the Hunter 2 is a slow-burn ritual rather than a twitch shooter. You spend most of your time reading the world: glassing slopes with binoculars, following faint tracks, listening to distant calls, and placing decoys or blinds when birds are involved. The action rewards patience — lining up a shot on a moose or elk can take several careful minutes of positioning, judging wind and elevation. Weapons feel weighty; bullets have travel and recoil that actually make you think about range and bullet drop. The game gives you tools to plan hunts: a tent for waiting out weather, tripods for steady shots, and a selection of rifles, bows and shotguns. If you love methodical pacing (think stalking and observation more than constant firefights), this scratches that itch.
A Dog, A Lodge, and Tents — Systems That Matter
What sets this game apart from a lot of open-world hunting sims is how these systems interact. The hunting dog is not cosmetic — it searches for signs, follows blood trails, and can help locate wounded game. It levels up and feels rewarding when it finds the exact spot you missed. Lodges act as progression hubs: you can display trophies, buy upgrades and plan expeditions per territory. Placing tents to fast-travel or skip bad weather is a small addition that hugely improves long excursions; I found myself camping on ridgelines waiting for the golden hour like a proper obsessive. Decoys and blinds give you alternate playstyles for birds and wary animals, and basic habitat monitoring adds a light management layer that fits the simulator vibe.
Looks, Sound, and the Tech Tangled Underneath
Visually the game is often stunning — sweeping light, believable animal models and dense pockets of forest that feel alive. Binoculars, scopes and the animal behaviors make for some genuinely cinematic moments: I’ve sat in a blind watching a bull elk feed as sunlight sliced through mist, and it felt incredible. But the technical side is mixed. At launch many players (and I) ran into optimization issues: hitching, blurry LODs in foliage, occasional audio cutouts and, importantly, reports of a memory leak that makes sessions unplayable on some machines. The devs were quick to push hotfixes and some reports say stability improved, but expect to tinker with settings. Accessibility is decent — configurable difficulty and different play aids — though I’d like more HUD customization and finer control mapping (the radial menu can be fiddly on controller). Overall, the presentation swings between ‘jaw-dropping’ and ‘please patch this’, sometimes in the same hour of play.
Way of the Hunter 2 is a fascinating, often beautiful hunting sim that already nails many core systems: dog tracking, lodges, tents and realistic pacing. But the Early Access launch carries real technical baggage that can ruin sessions. Buy it if you enjoy patient, simulator-style hunts and trust the devs to patch aggressively; otherwise wait for more polish.
Pros
- Stunning environments and improved animal models
- Meaningful systems — dog tracking, tents, lodges and decoys
- Methodical, realistic pacing that rewards patience
- Strong foundational content with long-term support planned
Cons
- Early Access technical issues: crashes and memory leaks
- Audio glitches and occasional visual pop-in
- HUD/controls need more customization — radial menu awkward
Player Opinion
Players are split but there are clear trends: many praise the leap in visuals, the new dog mechanic and tangible improvements over the first game — especially the lodge and tent systems. A sizable portion of the community, however, reported serious technical issues at launch: memory leaks, crashes during the tutorial, blurry foliage LODs and intermittent audio dropouts. Several reviewers noted quick developer hotfixes that improved stability for some users, turning frustrated refunds into updated positive reviews. If you loved methodical sims like the first Way of the Hunter or prefer the slower, observational feel compared to Call of the Wild, most of the community thinks you’ll enjoy WotH2 — provided your rig runs it stably or you’re willing to ride the patch train.