izigame.me

The map itself looks great! Maybe a bit overpopulated with animals in some spots. It feels like a shooting gallery at times, but that may be a result of the very far visibility almost everywhere. There is some dense coniferous woodland but a lot of the map consists of wide open terrain with beautiful streams and rolling hills.
On to the “story”. It’s a mess. There is a very clear agenda throughout the game, and they push it in your face at every possible moment. The base game had it's fair share of cringe but this is on another level. It's like they purposefully tried to irritate their playerbase.
Let’s get into this riveting story. The first thing you’ll notice: You are forced to play as a female Wildlife Warden. Dear devs: You want to give players the ability to play as a young woman in a game genre that likely has a playerbase of around 90% middle aged and older male players? Sure, go ahead, but make it a choice. The devs also had the great idea, to put in our warden colleague and good friend: “Nina”, also a young independent woman. You can enjoy the “hilarious” banter between the two over the radio basically throughout the whole story.
The content of the story is pretty much always the same: Gun safety! Climate Change! Stupid and incompetent men messing around in our wildlife reserve that constantly need babysitting by our strong and independent main character and her sidekick Nina! Picking Flowers! Putting up Flyers all over the reserve!
If that doesn’t convince you to buy this HUNTING game dlc, let me highlight some personal "favorite moments" during the story I experienced so far: Our character and her friend Nina constantly challenge each other to fun little games! Hihi so quirky! In one of those, you get to drive a race against time in your beast of a racing-truck in this HUNTING game. I think I averaged about 25km/h. Wow, how exhilarating!
In another side mission, you actually get to hunt male Caribou. I know, crazy right, actual HUNTING?! But wait, wanna know why? Because our bestie girlfriend Nina was shocked to see them act aggressively towards their female mating partners. She includes a part of a songtext she likes: “She’s tired of crying and sick of his lies, She’s suffered him for far too many years of her life”. Wow, powerful, the topic of abusive relationships totally fits into this HUNTING game! Anyway, the males apparently go on “rampages” and her friend Mike says it’s probably because of climate change.... I shit you not.
In another mission some comically dumb obnoxious beer drinking bungling idiot (#cancelallmen), who got fined for throwing his trash in a lake and therefore hates all game wardens (makes sense), challenges us to shoot a female surf scoter. Wanna know why? Because “males already have a hard time living these days”, he says.
Yeah. Totally natural stuff to put in a mission description of a HUNTING game.
These are the things I noticed while playing the dlc story for the first few hours. There will probably be more of that stuff down the line.
Yes, you can just ignore the story and play the game for what it is supposed to be, a HUNTING simulation. Of course, but only if you don’t care about the shiny new toy, which they locked behind this masterpiece of a story. I'm not going to comment on that (it's a crossbow ) since I don't have it yet.