Cabela's Big Game Hunter Review
If you have ever wondered what it is like to track and kill a dangerous, man-eating lion or bear, you might want to look somewhere other than Cabela's Big Game Hunter for a realistic look at it. Despite the outdoorsman cred the Cabela name adds to the title, there is very little to this hunting game that feels remotely accurate.
Hunting seems like a genre screaming for first-person view so you feel as through you are right there. Instead, Big Game Hunter pulls you out of the equation; giving you a third-person perspective and a grizzled hunter character to control. It gives the game a tiny bit of a story, but a hunting game does not need a narrative or story to explain why or what you are doing. While wandering around the landscapes of Montana, British Columbia, New Zealand, and Africa, you will notice ever-present crosshairs in the center of the screen. The sights turn red when on an animal, and pulling the left trigger pulls up your scope view for a better look at the animal. Someone has evidently taken a census of each area prior to your arrival, because each animal you have your crosshairs on instantly lists a highly detailed description of it; including weight, age, and sex.
Animals are abundant in the game, but you will have to show some restraint. The one piece of realism the game provides, outside of your gear, is the need for hunting tags. You will get either tags or permission for each animal you kill. The game will offer warnings for animals you do not have permission to kill, but after the third 'mistake', it is game over. When you do have tags for an animal, after you shoot it, your 'adrenaline' meter goes up. It seems strange the first time you see it, and eventually proves to be downright asinine. After racking up a few animals, your meter becomes full, and you are ready to press the left bumper to use it.
When you use 'adrenaline', everything except your gun stops moving. This turns animals, quite literally, sitting ducks. The effect is exciting in action games, like Stranglehold and Max Payne, but that is because there are enemy bullets to dodge. No such danger in Big Game Hunter exists, making it an unnecessary, unsportsmanlike gimmick. It is even less a necessity when you start noticing just how eager the animals in the game are for their 'big shot'. All too often, animals stop and pose for you to shoot them while they stare at you. There are plenty of moving targets for you to shoot at, but they never seem too interested in getting away from the area; choosing instead to alternate twenty-seconds of running with five-seconds of standing still.
If that does not make your hunts easy enough, animals are not only unfazed by the ringing gunshots as you take down one of their brethren; they seem intrigued by it, flocking in mass towards your area. If there is one element of hunting that should remain realistic, it is that animals are scared of people and loud noises. Somehow, the developers loose track of this simple fact of nature. The result is swarms of animals to shoot at and the occasional animal that will readily walk right past you as though looking for food.
In the rare event that you are unable to find any of species you need to shoot, you have a few helpful tools at your disposal. The most realistic and common sense of them is your inventory, which contains hunting tools from duck calls to fighting antlers to species specific scents to draw in your prey. The other 'weapon' at your disposal is 'hunter sense'. Not only do the developers think that your father was Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, they believe that your mother was the alien in Predator. A half-Neo, half-Predator lovechild sounds like an interesting scenario for a game, but it makes a mess of a hunting simulation. Pressing the right bumper unveils your 'hunter sense', and changes the landscape to a strange black and white heat-sensing mode where you mysteriously 'know' where the animals are hiding.
The game replaces the patience required for finding animals to hunt with an incredible amount of pointless walking from spot to spot. Frequently, you must walk from one spot to the next to talk to someone about your hunting. When you get there, the person will ask you to go hunt some specific animals with tags they provide. The animals in question are typically right back where you started. The game adds these annoying little treks through the wilderness as a way to extend the gameplay, which still clocks in at only three hours for all hunts. It stretches gameplay to the point it is half-hunting, half-hiking simulator.
The walks would not be so bad if it were not for terrible level design, forcing you to stay exactly where the developers want you to at all times. The shortest path may be a straight line, but that would leave the game in the two-hour range for game time. Instead, the developers make impassable obstacles like a flower or small shrub, leaving your hunter unable to walk through, even though you just climbed up a steep hill and climbed a ninety-degree rock wall. The walks from one location to the next are still manageable thanks to your map, unless you are playing on 'expert' difficulty, where the game's idea of an 'expert' hunter is an unprepared one. Each map makes it look like your hunting area is huge, but it is easy to walk from one side of the map to the other in a few minutes, even with the constant 'impassable' flowers and shrubs.
You are never required even to call someone to collect your animals, perhaps because they disappear on their own after lying on the ground for thirty seconds. Mind numbing repetition replaces the mundane tasks of hunting. Each 'season' plays the same. Immediately speak to someone to get tags, learn that you need to shoot a few of animal 'A' before they will give you tags for animal 'B'. Complete both, while taking out a handful of birds along the way in optional mini-games, before finally getting to take out the area's 'trophy' animal, which has been conveniently marked as such on the previously mentioned census.
If you are lucky, something that can actually kill you attacks you just before you leave. These bits of excitement are 'rival hunt' events, and happen unexpectedly at the end of a few seasons. Each plays out nearly identical, with a large, dangerous animal trying to make you his dinner. You have to keep an eye on where the animal is at all times. If you are facing the right direction when they are charging towards you, the game flashes a message asking you to hit either B or X to dodge the attack. Hit the button in time, and your acrobatic hunter gets to his feet with the animal growling fiercely, and conveniently standing completely still, for about ten seconds. Since these are not your ordinary deer or water buffalo, they take around eight to ten shots to defeat; with yourself defeated if you fail to dodge half-dozen attacks.
Though the difficulty ramps up slightly as you shoot your way through, it is a ridiculously easy game that makes you long for hourly rentals. Despite the fact that the trophy animals are eventually grazing with other similar animals, and the fact that smaller animals are rough to spot in the winter, the game still clocks in at well short of earning even your rental dollars. With the career mode over so quickly, the game only offers the opportunity to start over or play ultra-brief 'quick hunt' modes in the same environments, though this time with only one animal to tag.
The game is graphically inept. Animals look like bad wax museum copies of themselves, often looking bad enough that it is possible to confuse a tree stump and a deer from one-hundred yards out. The hunting locations fare a little better, but the game suffers from technical issues that causes items to render too closely to you. It often appears as though grass is constantly growing a few feet in front of you while walking. The human models look decent enough, but your hunter frequently suffers from jittery animations that leave you questioning whether he should really be handling a gun. Sonically, the game receives better voice work than it deserves. There is not much in the way of speaking, but at least they got the accents right for the different countries you visit. The ambient noise is cranked up a bit too loud, often sounding as though you are hunting from the middle of your local zoo's birdhouse.
At least you will not be plugging away for hours in search of Achievement Points, although the game seems to muck up even this small task. The one-shot kill achievements on the trophy targets is either badly broken, or the game refuses to count badly missed and non-lethal hits. At least this is in your favor, unlike the long-shot Achievements, which seems to ignore the fact that the maps themselves are limited in space, not counting the terrain that prevents you from scoping an animal from that far.
Cabela's Big Game Hunt is fails to deliver on all fronts, failing to provide a realistic hunting simulation or at least compelling gameplay.
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