Reviewed: January 4, 2007
Reviewed by: Blake Kenny
Publisher
Activision Value
Developer
Fun Labs
Released: September 22, 2006
Genre: Sports
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
6
6
5
5
5.6
Supported Features
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Man’s fascination with hunting totally escapes me. More power to you if it’s something you enjoy, but blowing away animals isn’t something I could ever take pleasure in. Of course, in saying that, I guess I could be viewed as a bit of a hypocrite. Even though I won’t ever be the one to pull the trigger, I have no qualms about eating wild game if a slab of it should happen to drop onto my dinner plate along with a baked potato.
I guess I just don’t see hunting as a fair sport. An animal really doesn’t have much of a chance when you blow it away from 150 yards with a scoped rifle. To me, that’s not really all that impressive of a feat. Now run at a bear, screaming out your battle cry and kill it with your bare hands, then I’ll think more highly of your hunting prowess. Hell, I’ll even give you a knife, you know, just to even up the odds and make up for the fact that man is generally weaker than most animals. Shooting an animal from a distance with little personal risk, (save for maybe being blown away by another hunter) doesn’t really make me appreciate the skills of a man.
I guess for me it’s not even the lack of equality between the hunter and the hunted that I dislike, it’s the shear fact that I simply can’t shoot an otherwise defenceless animal in the name of sport. Killing an animal in the name of survival, well that’s something else, but then few hunters kill animals to survive. After all, if a hunter can afford all the expensive equipment involved in this activity, surly they can afford to buy a pound of ground beef and a bottle of ketchup from the supermarket.
Anyway, my beliefs aren’t the issue here, I’m just pointing out that with my obvious lack of interest in the real life act of hunting, I wanted you to know that I’m going into this knowing that writing this game article is my duty – and that my personal dislike and disinterest in a game based on hunting has to be ignored for the sake of an unbiased opinion.
So with this review I’m going in with the intention of grading it, like all my reviews, on the technical merits it deserves, the graphics and sounds it presents and the overall value and fun it can offer. Even though I won’t ever go hunting, that doesn’t mean I’m unable to enjoy this type of game and give it a fair evaluation. So with that said, here’s what I thought of Cabela’s Alaskan Adventures.
After a brief tutorial hunt that runs you through some basic controls and the chance to bag a polar bear, you’ll reach your first of many outposts. From here you can engage in main hunts, special hunts and bonus events like fishing, bird hunting and dogsled racing. Some of these hunts have restriction placed on them, such as using a specific type of weapon, shooting animals within or outside of a certain range or in some cases, shooting a specific sex - and while I wanted to use whatever weapons I liked, it creates a lot of challenge when you have to hunt under certain conditions and non-negotiable criteria.
From the outpost you can get the tags you need to legally hunt specific animals. Just like real world hunting, you can’t just go out into the wilderness and blow away whatever you like. After you get your tags you can stock up on various supplies to prepare yourself for the upcoming hunt. Camouflage, ammo, med kits, food, decoys, sprays to mask your scent, it’s all available for a fee and more money can be earned from successfully completing hunts. Careful though, as shooting illegal game can come with penalties and fines, making it harder to afford that new gun you’ve been ogling over. Shooting offspring for example, instead of adult game isn’t tolerated.
The hunting itself can sometimes feel more like a chore than fun, as the game forces you to spend a great deal of time just walking around and trying to find a target. I’m sure real hunting is no different, but in the game world, boredom is all you’re going to get from 20 straight minutes of walking without any action. I get the fact that this is supposed to be a simulator of sorts, but when playing a game, a little fun and excitement is often more important than authenticity.
Should you happen to find a target, you then have to contend with the possibility of scaring it away should your presence become known. If you manage to get yourself into position to make a shot you better have your gun all sighted up, otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of ammo with nothing to show for it. For me, shooting accuracy was my biggest problem, as your targets were seldom standing still, and a quick trigger finger is often needed. In the beginning I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a howitzer, although my skills did improve a bit with some time and a little practice. In fact, the game occasionally dishes out attribute points, which can be used to increase your skills.
The game also tries to spruce up the action by making the hunter the hunted. While stalking some hares, I was basically ambushed and mauled to death by 2 cougars. So needless to say, you have to be vary aware of your surroundings and what might be lurking in the bushes. This feeling on impending danger adds a lot to the game, since without it, there’s no real sense of urgency.
If you should happen to avoid being killed by some of the game’s more dangerous animals, you also have to contend with the fact that your character has to be the least healthy man on earth. Certainly he must be smoking 3 packs a day and eating sticks of butter wrapped in bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner, because this guy can get seriously winded really fast. Your stamina gauge goes down steadily as you trudge across the terrain. Should it go all the way down you become completely immobile until you rest and give it time to replenish.
This isn’t such a bad thing, but it goes down way to fast for activities that would be no problem for even an unfit person to accomplish. Even when you’re crouching and moving slowly, with out any significant exertion, it still goes down. It’s a real pain in the ass and hurts the gameplay dramatically. I could see the stamina bar going down if I ran for a mile with a bear chasing me, but a 50-foot march across flat land shouldn’t make you damn near fall over puffing, wheezing and gasping for breathe.
Not only was the stamina bar a nuisance, but character movement was plain old slow. If I fired upon and missed an animal as it ran past me, I couldn’t turn around fast enough to track it for another shot.
Still, there is something positive to be said for bagging an animal. After 20 minutes of stalking an animal, it’s pretty exciting when you finally manage to shoot one. Some kills seem to require legitimate skill and others seem to happen because the animal A.I. is so incredibly stupid. In one hunt I was required to shoot a lynx, a fox and a wolf. None of these targets required any hunting skill, as each and every one of them basically attacked me and was blown away at point blank range.
On my very first hunt in which I was required to shoot and kill 2 musk ox, an ox charged and ran right into me. I was standing still while it shoved against me. I wasn’t being pushed over and the ox wasn’t moving either, but was still displaying the run animation. With this ox pushing against me for like 20 seconds I simply fired my gun and killed it. This seemed highly unrealistic to me, as I’m sure a real world hunter would have been trampled to death in such a situation. While I don’t have any practical experience to compare it too, I’m sure real hunts don’t go down like this. Overall the hunting went without a hitch, but the A.I. defiantly left something to be desired.
In the end I found myself thrilled when I got a good kill, but this feeling fell short when put up against the horrid gameplay and worse A.I. The game just isn’t a whole lot of fun to play, the gameplay mechanics suffer, and not a single thrilling kill could make up for the torture I felt in having to play it.
The game also has a few other adventures a player can partake in. For example, there’s duck hunting, ice, spinner and shore fishing, heck there’s even sled dog racing. For the most part I enjoyed these little diversion, because getting killed wasn’t an issue and you could enjoy them for what they were. The bird hunting reminded me of Nintendo’s classic Duck Hunt game in which you used a light gun. While this looks light-years better, you still get 2 shots to try and take something out. The fishing events, while simple in design were amusing and enjoyable, but didn’t offer enough to sustain them. They were just a little too simplistic. The sled dog races where neat, but coming through the finish line with you sled intact was a big problem. It seems sleds are far more susceptible to damage than I had imagined.
Overall Cabela’s Alaskan Adventure tries to squeeze a lot of entertainment value into one small package. Unfortunately, none of these modes received the attention they deserved. Rather than make one phenomenal experience, the developers seemed content to make a half-dozen mediocre experiences instead.
Graphically this game is a bit of a mixed bag, leaning more towards ugly than beautiful. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its moments, but some if it is downright awful. The snowy scenes and some of the animals look absolutely dreadful, especially the unbelievably bad effect for falling snow. The falling snow was so bad I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like, big, chunky, circular sprites with jagged edges falling down – and they only fell in the foreground and not in the distance, creating absolutely no illusion of depth. It was as if it was snowing a foot in front of me, but beyond that, no snow was falling what-so-ever.
Some of the animal looked pretty good, but animated poorly for the most part. Sometimes I was impressed with the way fur looked, but with hairy animals like the musk ox, well, they looked very angular and blocky. Considering the name of the game is hunting, the animals deserved far more attention than they received.
This isn’t to say that I never once thought to myself - “Well, that looks pretty good”, it’s just that these moments were rare. Fact is, the great looking moments in this game were still garbage compared to 360 graphics as a whole. It’s just that sometimes this game looked so poor, than when something was above average, it fooled you into thinking it was better than it really was. Case in points, water was nicely done, not perfect in regards to it’s reaction to a propeller driven boats, but good in regards to reflections.
Overall, the game just doesn’t cut it. A game this simple should at least look good, it’s not like a lot of work is going into the any other aspect of it creation, so at least convince me I’m outdoors, that’s all I ask. Make me feel like I’m in some secluded region of the world with nothing but nature and a rifle to sustain me. The only thing Alaskan Adventures made me believe was that I was sitting in my living room playing an inferior game - where the only wildlife in the vicinity was my cat sleeping on the recliner.
Musically the game is a basic as they come, mainly because there is none. Other than a small tune that runs in the start-up menus, there’s nothing to be heard.
You know what else I noticed thanks to this game? Nature is also very quiet. In fact in the beginning, the only thing you’ll hear is the crunching of snow under your feet and the gasping for breath from your severely asthmatic hunter.
You also get the occasional rustling of animals in the bushes, a few growls here and there, and thankfully the beefy, powerful blast of your gunfire. In fact, your guns are the only things that sound good in this entire game – and frankly, it’s about all there is to hear.
This is another example of a game that needs to be value priced and thrown into the bargain bins as quickly as possible. It’s hard with the unimpressive graphics, weak gameplay and low entertainment value to recommend this game to anyone but the more serious and die hard hunting fan. If hunting is your thing and you need a fix when the real world hunting season is in limbo, then maybe you’ll get something out of this, but for casual and hardcore gamers who expect a lot from their 360’s, well you won’t find anything mind-blowing here.
Alaskan Adventures like everything else Cabela does, offers promise, but never seems to deliver the goods. In an age where software developers are tweaking A.I to mimic human behaviours, getting the behaviour of a few animals down shouldn’t be too much to ask. In addition, with all the graphical horsepower under the hood of our fine machine, I want to see lush visuals that make me believe I’m in the wilderness. Cabela’s Alaskan Adventures fails to live up to both of these simple requests.
The various Cabela hunting games have been coming out in droves for years and years and personally I don’t remember any of them really offering a player much excitement. Like I said, maybe you need to be a hunting fan in real life to appreciate this stuff, but for me, it’s flat out dull. Even without having gone hunting before, this doesn’t at all make me believe I’m doing it.
While it’s nice that the game tries to mix stuff up with the duck hunting and the fishing, none of these additional activities excel in any way. The A.I. is lacking, the excitement is lacking, and so are the graphics and sound to convince me I’m there. Cabela’s Alaskan Adventures like most Cabela games before it - falls flat. It’s not that hunting is a bad concept for a videogame; the problem is that this one never lives up to the technical possibilities that the 360 can afford it.