Explore an Atmospheric Open World: Discover breathtaking fishing spots across sprawling waterways by foot, boat, or off-road vehicle. Traverse a living world at your own pace, discovering winding rivers, soaring peaks, hidden ponds and springs, and epic hiking trails.
Feel the Genuine Thrill of Freshwater Fishing: Battle fierce Largemouth Bass, Mountain Whitefish and more in an engaging, accessible fishing experience. Each species has its own unique behavior, requiring you to carefully counter their movements to reel them in.
Become a Master Angler: Learn expert techniques and adapt your strategy to land the most challenging catches. Build out your collection of gear and use a wide range of rods, fully customizable with a growing selection of reels, lines, floats, hooks, lures, and bait.
Play Solo or With Friends: Ride the open waters on your own or share the journey with friends in online drop-in/drop-out co-op multiplayer for up to 12 players. Team up with fellow anglers and go on unforgettable journeys together!
Enjoy an Evolving Stream of New Content: Call of the Wild: The Angler will continue to deliver memorable new fishing experiences with regular post-launch content updates.
CotW: The Angler is available on PC only at the moment, but Xbox and PlayStation editions are slated for release “in the near future”. Curiously there is a difference between the Epic Games Store and Steam Store pricing for the game, but fortunately it seems as if both are using Regional Pricing.
Additionally, the game is also available on Green Man Gaming at the same price as on Steam (R175). But if you’ve bought titles from GMG in the past and have accmulated some GMG XP you could pick up it up with a decent discount. I am only at Bronze Tier and get 20% off, meaning I could pay just R140 for it at the moment. And presumably, higher tiers even less.
And then finally, developers EW are offering a very tempting inducement to add The Angler to your Steam library by combining it with theHunter in a “Complete Your Collection Bundle”. Owners of theHunter on Steam can complete their collection at a further 25% off the already decent regional price for the new title - that would be just R131.25.
At a little under R230 for both base games, this Limited Time Offer (no indication of when it’ll expire) would also be the most cost effective way to get both games if you’ve been waiting for the right time to grab theHunter anyway.
* These prices are for the Base Game only. Based on theHunter, the new game will get a lot of DLCs over the next few years as the game develops and grows. There are currently 25 paid DLC packs for theHunter. They range in price from R36 - R87. There’s also 8 free DLC packs for it. I expect the same to happen with The Angler.
See that the reviews on the Steam page has it sitting on Mostly Negative at the moment. Glancing through them it looks like the most common complaints are about the visual quality of the water in the game, the lack of character customisation options, some immersion breaking issues, and a bunch of technical glitches.
The intro in the current Most Helpful negative review says:
Despite calling this a full release this is very much an early access project that needs a lot of work. There are many good features and visuals and many bad or outright missing features and visuals.
The world itself looks incredible but the Water, the most important aspect in a fishing game, looks awful and blurry and your bobbers are all but invisible on the surface unless very close to you. actually fighting the fish is good but then there is an awful immersion breaking black screen cut to you suddenly holding the fish when you catch it, no pulling the fish out of the water or netting it.
As a counter point, this one (albeit with a 3070Ti GPU) says:
I get 100+ fps, game runs smooth. The water is beautiful and crispy incfront of you or when in direct sunlight. But it does have a sort of depth of field blue at the sides and distance.
Fishing is fishing. Pretty typical stuff here. Pretty similar to UFS2 or FP. Bite and strike indicators are in every fishing game nothing unusual going on with the gameplay. Line strength is a bottleneck to catching big fish just like every other fishing game. You won’t catch a 12 pounder on 2 pound line. Frequency seems more difficult, not catching fish exact spot on every cast, seems more dynamic and random and life like than FP. Got to grind this one out and stay on the move. Day night cycle is long. Exploring and fish n chill are where the game really pops. Thumbs up, good game, great potential.
So yeah, a definite case of caveat emptor here at the moment. I’ve spent a fair bit of time wandering round aimlessly in theHunter to know that Expansive Worlds are definitely able to create an immersive outdoor game. And I know there’s a few other MEWbs who can attest to that too. On that basis, and at the price I can get it now, I’m personally comfortable adding it to my library - thanks Discovery Vitality points! It can sit there a stew along quietly until it’s at the level of it’s older sibling.
Definitely sounds like it needs a little more time to sort out the major issues. Happily, it looks like the devs are on the ball with a patch coming out tomorrow morning already.
**Additionally, we’ll release our first hotfix tomorrow - fixing some of the most urgent technical issues you’ve brought up to us.
I know, right?! It confused the heck out of me too. That, and the fact that the way they show the title on the artwork is different to how it’s listed in text - doubly irritating!!
