My rambling Mississippi Acres Review

[fokinther]

My apologies if this is posted in the wrong place. I wrote this review for the new reserve, but it's way too long for the Store page, so I'll post it here if nobody minds.

Mississippi Acres is, as of the time of writing, the newest DLC reserve for Call of the Wild. I enjoyed exploring this map, but I can't say it's my favourite. This is my rambling, in-depth review/analysis. I will also try to look at some of the complaints and questions folks on the forums have had about the map.

The Good
Surprisingly varied terrain for a "swamp" map. You won't be slogging through water all the time.
A nice variety of small to medium animals. Gators are cool and raccoons are cute. I liked the quail too.

The Bad
Alligators can be glitchy and sometimes dont float to the player even when one-shotted.
Map is a bit on the small side

Other
No side missions.
Weather may not be to everyone's taste
No waterfowl, strange considering that Classic's counterpart to this map had four different duck species.
Rivers can make barriers to navigation


Environments
Mississippi Acres has more varied terrain than just swampland, though much of it is low-lying, and rain and water are ever-present. In the east, the land rises to wooded hills, and in addition to the winding oxbow lakes and rivers in the center of the map there are agricultural areas, with cotton fields and other crops. These areas often provide cover for the quail and rabbits. Many areas on the map are partially flooded. There are a decent amount of human habitations here as well, ranging from half-flooded ruins and old churches to redneck-style shacks and more upscale houses. There are even random items of furniture lying abandoned on the side of the roads. I think they were probably left by locals fleeing the flooding, but a few people on the forums think the run-down shacks and the trash lying around (and some elements of the storyline) are portraying the South in a bit of a poor light.
The lodges in the map are not nearly as copy-paste as they usually are in this game, with some of them having unique decorative touches (see if you can find the one with the armed raccoons). Some of them are neat and well-furnished little two-story houses, others are small shacks.

The weather is mostly rainy or overcast, and a lot of people seem to be complaining about it. I don't really mind it, it is marshland after all, and the story of the area involves recent upheaval due to flooding. That said, I can see why some people don't like the constant rain.
I haven't made any comparisons myself, but quite a few people are saying that this map is smaller than most of the other reserves. Other complaints are that there are no boats, and thus no way of navigating the large areas of open water. Now I too would love to be able to traverse the map (and others, too, like Yukon Valley) via a canoe or something similar, but considering how buggy this game is trying to implement watercraft would probably be a disaster.

I had some bugs, including a crash to desktop part-way through the reserve's introductory cinematic, and I occasionally had brief but severe FPS drops (not sure why). Also, a certain animal during a story mission resurrected while the reserve guide was talking to the player. The swingy gates sometimes glitch out too.

Overall, I quite like the environments. It's not all endless swamps (like most of Rougarou Bayou is on Classic), and the human habitation makes this a bit like an American equivalent of the Hirschfelden farmland. The rivers can be difficult to cross, and the deep water can be a problem when hunting the alligators, though. Speaking of...


Species
Mississippi Acres includes a decent array of small to medium animals to hunt, with some surprising omissions. Returning animals are Black Bears, Whitetail Deer, Rabbits, Turkeys, and Feral Pigs. New for this map are Grey Foxes, Raccoons, Quail and Alligators.
The low-lying terrain and cover from crop fields can make hunting the smaller animals tricky. I like the quails, they work similarly to pheasants but they seem to be a bit easier to flush into flight.

The raccoons are cute, but I haven't seen one climbing into a bin like it does in the trailer. That said, I haven't hunted them much yet, so hopefully they do scavenge from trash!

Now we come to the alligators. Many complaints have been made about these, and how the deep water makes it difficult to hunt them. You will often see them swimming in deeper water, and unless you manage to kill them instantly with a single shot, they will sink beneath the surface and will never be seen again. If you are able to pull off an instant kill, they will float to the riverbank like ducks do and will be able to be collected- in theory, at least. People have reported them glitching out, getting stuck on floating logs and branches, amongst other things. Some people on the forums are saying that they are making perfect kill shots and the gators aren't floating to be collected. I had a hard time one-shotting them, and had to resort to trying to kill them when they came onto land. I found that even shallow-looking creeks count as "deep water" when determining whether a killed gator floats or not. Even on land if you don't kill them near instantly they may dive into the water and vanish. So your mileage may vary with the alligators. Though the alligator scoring is based on length, the in-game gators don't visually differ in size.
All in all, I don't think they're too bad, and at least nobody can complain that they are just a reskin of an existing animal. Still, you have to be more careful than usual when and where you shoot them.

There is a new rifle included with the reserve, intended for small game. Some reviews talk about it being underpowered. I have not used it myself, so I can't comment on this.

Overall, I like the range of species here, but I am confused and a bit disappointed that there are no waterfowl on this map. Not a single duck or goose! Considering Rougarou Bayou (on Classic) had four different duck species (in addition to black bear, bobcat, feral hogs and whitetail) I had really hoped to see ducks. That said, some people on the forums and the Reddit page are saying that the developers plan on updating the game's waterfowl at some point in the near future, so perhaps they will later include at least one duck species in the Acres.

Missions
The mission arc for this reserve is set in the aftermath of a recent bout of floods. You've been employed as a camp counsellor by Immi, a teacher/summer camp owner who knows your character from when you both got your hunting licenses years back, and the chaos caused by the floods (and some strange shenanigans) has her needing your help.
You may have noticed that in the trailer, there is a second woman's voice also talking about the reserve and its creatures. This is Betty Tackett, the leader of the Big Game Club, and she's the other significant NPC in the story. As is usual for Call of the Wild, the voice acting is surprisingly decent for a hunting game.

Some of missions are fetch quests, while most of others are investigative. Only one is actually about hunting down and killing an animal, (it's essentially a tutorial for gator hunting, where Immi will tell you about where best to shoot them etc). I triggered it early for some reason. There a few problems people are having with trying to progress through the story after acquiring certain items. There is a change in this reserve to mission items, you need to go into the Codex, find the mission item in question, and click-drag and rotate it with the mouse in order to find clues you need to progress in the mission.
An early mission has an item you need to get that is out of reach in the branch of a tree. Some people are stuck here. Shoot the branch.

I found the missions to be about average, though I enjoyed them more than the Te Awaroa story. Aside from a crash during the intro, I didn't come across any bugged missions (though some folks have, such as the tire swing objective, so keep your eyes peeled). Some story elements I was a bit unsure of, and I found the ending a bit disappointing.
There's sabotage at Immi's summer camps and Scooby-Doo style shenanigans to look into. Clues you find hint that this is the work of the Big Game Club, as one of the cassettes in the speakers has a recording from their meetings on the B-side.
This is where I thought that this was a setup by a third party, trying to get Immi and the BGC at each other's throats. Surely the tape was too obvious a clue, right? When Betty mentioned that her brother's surname was Baden, I felt sure that this was going to be the twist, and it would be Baden who's the real villain, and the two women (and their respective clubs/groups) would put aside their differences to put a stop to his activities, and in the end Immi and the BGC (who would turn out to be decent folks at the end) would learn to appreciate, or at least tolerate, each other. (I guess I'm a bit of an idealist)
That isn't how it happened at all though.

Also, the story synopsis mentions two rival hunting clubs, but there's only one that shows up in the story. Immi seems to be a teacher and summer camp owner (who's also a hunter) and while her bio says she is a member of an African-American hunting organization, they aren't mentioned in the story, none of their club members call up or offer missions or anything. So is the second "hunting club" Immi's summer camp business?

There are no unique trophy animals in the storyline this time around.

As has been the case since Silver Ridge Peaks, there are no Side Missions in this reserve. This is a shame, as I enjoy side missions and objectives in games like this. I seem to be in the minority, though.


For those curious about political stuff...

Some of the people on the forums and in the reviews are concerned about whether the story missions have political messages in them, and a few others think the story (and the run-down lodges and roadside trash) paints Southerners in a negative light. A few others said that the portrayal is accurate.
With so much divisive political stuff being inserted into gaming and other hobbies these days, do these people have a point? I have to admit, when the trailer said "Where I'm from, history is impossible to escape," I did feel a twinge of apprehension myself.
Anyway, I played through the story and had a look around, and I admit I think it's a case of Your Mileage May Vary. There seem to be undertones there, but it's nowhere near what you often see in video games and movies these days. You aren't going to be beaten over the head by NPCs with a sermon about slavery or anything. I don't think that what's here is worth missing out on the map over even if it does annoy/offend. Reserve storylines (at least in recent maps) are only a small part of the overall gameplay anyway.

Spoilers ahead, but hopefully this will give people a bit more information so they can decide for themselves.


So the main NPC and the guide for this reserve is Immi Davis (who is african-american) and she's from this region, though she and her family left for Chicago when she was younger. The flooding has caused chaos for everyone, and during an early mission you are contacted by Betty Tackett, the chairwoman of the Delta Big Game Club.

The two women are polite to each other but there is obviously a dislike beneath the surface. The Big Game Club is depicted as being simultaneously a wealthy/influential group, and being a bunch of "good ol' boys" and they don't seem to like Immi and the summer camp she's set up (though we never do hear exactly why). Immi mentions she's not welcome at the Big Game Club's lodge, though nobody directly mentions her race. In a later confrontation over the phone both Betty and Immi throw insults at each other, but again, race isn't mentioned directly. While the Big Game Club are meant to be the unpleasant ones in the story, I got the impression that Immi herself looks down her nose a bit at them as well.

A few of the codex entries for the regions (like Bingham Bayou and one of the hilly areas) have a few of Immi's snide remarks (about just who worked the cottonfields that made the Bingham family rich, for example, or about the Devil's Fork folklore) and there's one or two landmarks and areas that have histories involving the Civil Rights era (like the church in Neptune hills)

As I said earlier, I found the ending to the story and the resolution of the plot to be a bit of a letdown. You end up finding that Baden and "the boys" of the Big Game Club are incubating gator eggs in an old logging facility and poaching adult gators. When Immi confronts Betty about this, she claims to have no knowledge of the operation (she says that the boys aren't used to taking orders from a woman. Whether that's true or she's trying to cover for herself is up for debate). She then agrees to sponsor Immi's summer camp and force the BGC to end their gator poaching, and Immi agrees to look the other way, but to me it seems less like any sort of reconciliation and more like the baddies getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar and making concessions to avoid getting prosecuted.
Oh, and while they were talking, the dead gator in the nearby pen resurrected... I wonder if anyone else had that glitch.
In an epilogue, Immi says that the people of Mississippi Acres need to look out for one another and that Betty seems to be warming up to the idea.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my seemingly endless review. If you were on the fence about getting the map, hopefully this was some help.
Good luck out there and hope you find plenty of diamonds.