theHunter: Call of the Wild goes black powder for the Old West
theHunter: Call of the Wild has added an Old West Weapon Pack, bringing a single-shot buffalo rifle, a 10-gauge coach gun and a top-break revolver to the hunting sim alongside patch 9.3.
Hunting games have spent a decade chasing realism through optics, aerodynamics and animal behaviour. theHunter: Call of the Wild has taken the opposite route for its latest paid add-on, swapping all of that for black powder and thick white smoke. The Old West Weapon Pack is out now, and it arrives with patch 9.3.
Three guns from the 19th century
The pack adds three working firearms of the American frontier. The Hween .45-90 Buffalo is a single-shot falling-block rifle built on the lines of the Sharps Model 1874, with an adaptive dual-mode Buckhorn sight and animations to match. It covers animal classes 4 to 9 and feeds on .45-90 Lead Flat Nose for a forgiving trajectory or .45-90 Soft Lead for maximum punch at 100 to 150 metres, after which velocity drops away quickly. It accepts the Flavus 6x17 and 10x17 rifle telescopes.
The Humphrey 10G Coach Gun is the loud one: a double-barrelled shotgun firing heavy 10-gauge brass black-powder shells, with external hammers and a partial reload that swaps only the spent shell. Birdshot handles classes 1 to 2, buckshot stretches to bears at classes 4 to 7, and slugs give short-range penetration against classes 6 to 9.
A revolver that empties itself
The Maijo .44-40 Special rounds out the trio, modelled on the top-break Schofield and tuned for classes 2 to 5. Breaking open the frame triggers an internal extractor that clears all six spent casings at once, so it trades a little raw power for the fastest follow-up shot in the pack. Ammunition runs from .44-40 Full Metal Jacket to a .44-40 Black Powder Cowboy Load.
What it costs and where it runs
The pack is £4.29 on Steam in the UK and $4.99 in the United States, and it is also on sale through the Xbox store, the Microsoft Store, PlayStation and the Epic Games Store. Expansive Worlds notes that the weapons unlock in the in-game store once the DLC is owned. Patch 9.3 landed on the same day, and the two are meant to be read together: the pack deliberately gives you less forgiving tools, with slower reloads, visible smoke and ammunition that punishes a badly judged range.
Our opinion
Most hunting DLC sells convenience in a box, and there is something refreshing about a pack that makes the game harder on purpose. The coach gun is the clearest example: ten-gauge brass, a partial reload and a cloud of white smoke that hides whatever you were aiming at, which is historically honest and tactically awkward in equal measure. Padding around in the modern reserves with nineteenth-century iron is exactly the sort of self-imposed handicap the genre has been missing. The price is sensible for three weapons, and the honest answer to whether you need them is that you do not — unless you want to remember that hunting used to be a one-shot discipline. Then the Buffalo rifle is worth every penny, and the deer will not care either way.