Overpass 2 might catch the eyes of racing fans out there as it ticks a few boxes aside from racing gameplay including team management and customization. But going hands on with the experience will undoubtedly turn sour for many. Like its predecessor, Overpass 2 aims to nab the wild, offroading niche element of the racing genre. It puts drivers through their paces by tasking them with not merely punching the gas and steering from point A to point B, but also finding the most desirable path. Off-roading should be a thrill, but Overpass 2 stifles the momentum in more ways than one.

"Off-roading should be a thrill, but Overpass 2 stifles the momentum in more ways than one."

Let’s start with the controls. Racing requires finesse and accuracy. Punch the gas too hard, turn a little too sharp, or barrel over debris or obstacles and you can ruin your shot at the gold. Fans of the genre know exactly where I’m coming from so there’s no need to beleaguer the point. By the very nature of the sport, racing sims should meet high standards when it comes to physics and controls. The controls should never get in the way of a player’s experience. Yet, Overpass 2 struggles with lagging input. Simply moving the analogue stick to veer left or right would result in a slight delay in the movement of my vehicle. This cramps the entire experience forcing me to be less reactive and more predictive of paths I’ve never driven before. Cornering on mountainous switchbacks becomes a pain.

The means by which you operate the camera is entirely nonsensical. At one point I found that the camera was off to the side viewing my driver from the right after I crashed driving uphill. It took me roughly 30 seconds tinkering with it trying to just make the camera face forward from behind my vehicle so I can actually see what’s in front of me. When all was said and done, I realized that you can’t intuitively turn the camera 360 degrees with the right stick as you’d expect in most racing games or even third-person adventures. What I found is that no matter what angle my camera is facing, I have to push my analogue stick forward to set things back to normal – not pivot as most games do.

Out in the wilderness, you’ll take your UTV or ATV over the most rugged terrain. You’ll find that many of the paths are littered with rocks and you’ll be forced to slow down drastically. Often times, I found myself moving up mountain sides at a snail’s pace as my vehicle attempted to crawl over rocks. It is nice to see an off-roading racing title offer a bit of player choice when it comes to tackling the terrain. But this is where the path-finding skill should kick in as you seek out the path of least resistance. Most times, there really isn’t one. The time trials were an utter bore as my vehicle slowly crawled over rocks and gravel. I am all for slow and methodical stuff but the experience is clunky and not fun at all.

"Overpass 2 struggles with lagging input. Simply moving the analogue stick to veer left or right would result in a slight delay in the movement of my vehicle."

Career mode enables you to dive into the team setting. It combines elements from racing simulators’ core tenants with the actual racing scene. If multiplayer, tutorials, standalone time trials and free roam aren’t your bag, career is really your only core option. Being forced to manage your team’s staff, sponsors, and other mundane tasks if you’re only in it for the racing is really quite a drag. Racing sims are for a specific crowd and not every racing fan enjoys the elements in them. Instantly, you’ll be forced into an overly long tutorial guided by a dull voice over that feels as tired and bored with Overpass 2 as I did. Eventually, they will stop interjecting to clue you into all the menus and details of day-to-day operations. Sadly, the management element feels like an afterthought. In career mode, you’ll maintain a calendar of events while also fielding sponsors, headhunting for staff, and developing your vehicles among other things. For the average racing fan, it’s all unnecessary menus that complicate the experience with an added measure of tedium. Those who enjoy management sims will likely find that it misses the mark as it isn’t quite as extensive and layered as other options available.

Visually, there isn’t anything to write home about in Overpass 2, except for maybe the fact that the human animations during cinematic sequences nearly look like they’re from the PS2/Xbox era. Everything is rather bland aside from the outdoor tracks, and even then, the environment can feel a tad monochromatic in the most gravel and rock-laden courses. As this isn’t a triple-A title from a major studio, much of this is to be expected, despite its glaring lack of frills, detail, and smooth animations.

If you’ve read GamingBolt’s review for the original Overpass in 2020, unfortunately, none of this will sound like anything new. Most of the flaws from the first title were carried over to the sequel without any solid improvement in the game’s mechanics or offerings. At the end of the day, the core gameplay is often frustrating and dull leaving little room for any enjoyment in Career mode, multiplayer, and beyond. The parts where slow and methodical gameplay is required isn’t fun and the physics and controls will often be a hindrance to the entire experience.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.

There are six zones to explore, spread across three locations in Colorado, Texas, and Europe. Naturally, the Colorado environments are filled with trees and hills, while Texas is mostly desert and Europe mostly marshes. They’re generally diverse in their layouts, and, while character and animal models are sometimes dated, the environments go easy enough on the eyes. The animal selections do vary slightly between hunting zones. Deer and Elk are more common in the forests, while ducks are rampant around water and coyotes roam the desert, though each environment has a variety of animals of all sizes.

"There are some limitations to your hunting. You have to buy and manage licenses to hunt in each of the three main locations."

There are some limitations to your hunting. You have to buy and manage licenses to hunt in each of the three main locations. If you don’t have a license to hunt a particular animal, you’ll be fined if you kill them. The same goes for if you use too many bullets or use an incorrect caliber gun. Frustratingly, almost all of the information regarding the limitations on hunting is left in your lodge, so if you happen to forget which animal can be killed by which gun, you’ll either have to make the trek back to the lodge or take a chance and hope the game doesn’t scold you when you finally have the animal in your sights.

The journey to find animals is generally the most monotonous part of Hunting Simulator 2. While the environments are expansive and diverse, they’re usually not filled with enough animals to make you think they’d become a designated hunting zone. More often than not I would spend long periods of time looking for virtually any sign of any animal, regardless of my ability to hunt them. In some cases, these sequences have a relaxing meditative quality to them, especially given their almost complete lack of music. In others, though, these sequences become boring because if you don’t have an animal on your radar, you really have nothing else to do.

There are hunting towers, blinds, and fast travel camps scattered around each environment, but they’re much less useful when you’re struggling to find anything to hunt. Even with the various animal whistles, having animals come to you is much less common than finding and tracking them on your own, and waiting for them to pop out becomes a tedious waiting game. To help you in your search on the ground, you have a dog companion by your side who can search for tracks and more easily follow the trail of other animals. While useful to locate hard-to-find clues, your dog’s abilities are inconsistent at best, and it has a tendency to pick up signs unrelated to an animal you’re currently tracking, throwing you off the pace more often than leading you there faster.

"The journey to find animals is generally the most monotonous part of Hunting Simulator 2. While the environments are expansive and diverse, they’re usually not filled with enough animals to make you think they’d become a designated hunting zone."

Even if you do find a sign of an animal, though, the game barely picks up. If you’re following tracks, you’re told which species left them and whether they’re new or old, though any combination of these is hit or miss on whether the animal is nearby. Sometimes fresh tracks lead you on a literal wild goose chase, while old tracks can lead you to the animal almost instantly. What commonly helps you find the animals is an icon that pops up intermittently when they’re within a certain radius of you. While these don’t appear for long, they help you locate the animals and speed up the tracking process.

The problem here is that this ultimately undermines any reason to track animals the way the game encourages. Being rewarded for aimlessly wandering an area by being shown the exact location of nearby animals renders any traditional searching and following tracks moot. While I did find myself glacially getting better at tracking and finding animals over time, this came as a result of personal discipline in forcing myself to do so, as the game didn’t encourage quietly tracking and hunting enough to offset the benefits from running around and hoping for icons. For people who want to use the traditional hunting formula, it will ultimately work, but the icons make the game feel like it’s holding your hand instead of allowing for the purest simulation experience and rewarding playing the intended way.

When you finally get an animal in your sights is when Hunting Simulator 2 truly peaks. While the journey to get there can be slow and sometimes painful, finally finding the animal you’ve been tracking can make the journey worth it, especially when you can silently take them out in a single shot. Getting the red hit marker, signaling that you cleanly killed the target, is exhilarating and relieving, especially given how long it likely took to find the animal. Even if you don’t kill an animal on the first hit, you’ll often be able to follow its blood trail and catch up to it, assuming it couldn’t run away quickly enough. The game is clearly aiming for you to find an animal’s tracks, follow it for just long enough, and smoothly kill it, because sequences like that are the most satisfying and enjoyable in the entire experience, though they don’t happen often enough.

"Being rewarded for aimlessly wandering an area by being shown the exact location of nearby animals renders any traditional searching and following tracks moot."

Ultimately, the biggest problem I found with Hunting Simulator 2 is that its gameplay doesn’t make up for its lack of progression. From the outset, you’re given enough credits to buy guns of almost any caliber and licenses for any animal. It doesn’t set out a path for you to start with small and easy targets, like ducks or foxes, and organically improve to more difficult targets like bears or cougars. There’s no final goal because everything is available from the start. In this sense, it’s true to form as a simulation because you’re given the freedom to do anything you want, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is too slow and inconsistent to make up for it. The only gameplay loop is selling animals for credits to buy different guns and licenses, but because I was given enough credits to buy serviceable guns and most licenses from the start, I didn’t find the act of hunting to be consistently satisfying or substantial enough to make me want to keep playing and collect everything from the store, nor did it entice me with the potential of hunting bigger and better enemies the more I played.

Throughout my time playing Hunting Simulator 2, specific moments that stick out in my head are few and far between. The majority of my time was spent almost insubstantially, wandering around empty environments hoping for an icon to pop up or for my dog to call me over to see an old pair of tracks. When I finally came across an animal and successfully hunted it the old-fashioned way, I was ecstatic to see the fruits of my labor, but too often I was made to feel like I was wasting my time, especially because I didn’t have anything to work toward and could have gotten the same reward from running around and hoping for an animal to pop up randomly. For all of its positive instances, there are long stretches of tedium and monotony that make Hunting Simulator 2 a tough sell, even to experienced hunters.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

With the world in the state that it is right now, sometimes you just want to kind of relax. Maybe you even want to go do some hunting to steady your mind. But maybe you don’t want to go outside, or maybe the thought of killing a real animal makes you a tad uncomfortable. Don’t worry, Hunting Simulator 2 has got you covered.

The game will come later this month for consoles, and next month for PC, via a press release from publisher Nacon. We also got a look at a new video that details the various equipment you’ll have access to in your virtual hunt. The game will have over 70 models of weapons of various different calibers and brands, challenging you to kind the best fit for your prey. Something too small won’t be able to take out some larger animals for instance, but something too big will destroy your trophy for smaller critters. There is also over 90 articles of clothing and accessories, from real-life brands such as Bushnell, Kryptek, SJK, Ligne Verney-Carron, Browning and Beretta. Check it out below.

Hunting Simulator 2 will release June 30th on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, July 16th for PC, and at a later date for the Switch. Those who pre-order on the Xbox One will also get access to an exclusive Beretta 486 shotgun.