Except for the volcano and a nice-looking lake, I haven’t stumbled across anything more interesting than a smoldering campfire, and getting around takes forever. The island is pretty enough, but there’s nothing exceptional about it. The sound design is spotty: A T-rex's footsteps don't sound like footsteps, and while its roar is terrifying, it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from even with my Roccat Kave 5.1 headset. I'm just not enjoying Primal in its current state. With another hour’s work I might actually manage to shoot a dinosaur dead, but A) what for? and B) no. I’m making good progress, despite the clearly unwalkable incline, and then I slip and bounce down the terrain a bit and die. So, then I decide that walking half-way back around the volcano to get down is dumb, and try to scale the side of it from where I am. First, I’m killed by a Utahraptor.Ī gun! Herah! A shotgun probably isn’t the ideal weapon against dinosaurs, but it’s a start. Getting a workable weapon can’t be too hard, I imagine, as I’m supposed to be the hunter here. There are supply crates scattered throughout this island, and I just have to find the right one without being torn to bits by alien hell lizards. I can’t intuit where my arrows will go, and so I need guidance.

As unrealistic as slow arrows or tracer arrows would be, it also isn’t realistic that I live in this world and yet I have no depth perception, don’t know the physical properties of my arrows or bow, and don’t know how hard I’m pulling the bow back. The feedback from shots is a bunch of screen shake, which doesn’t help at all.

Did I hit the T-rex? It wouldn’t have mattered if I did, because it’s a fucking T-rex, but as a greater issue, there’s no point taking shots at anything if I have no idea what my range is and what kind of arc I’m looking for.

My first issue with theHunter: Primal is that I have no sense of where my arrows are going. The T-rex does not like that, and swiftly murders me, my limbs flopping everywhere under a red glow.

The hunter primal dinosaur list