Cabela's Alaskan Adventures Review

Cabela’s Alaskan Adventures is a dichotomy of sorts.  You can’t fully label it an arcade hunting game, but you can’t call it a simulation either.  Mix in a very poor fishing game, a boring dogsled race, and a questionable duck hunt and you get one lukewarm 360 game.

You can elect to play Adventure (career) mode or Open Season.  Open season is just what the name implies; pick up a few tags and head out to the wilderness with your gear in tow.  Adventure mode takes you to each of four areas one by one where you will have to complete a series of challenges to unlock and purchase new weapons and equipment. 

Your first task in Adventure mode will be to create your character.  This is truly a pointless task because you’ll never see your character’s face again once you leave this screen, and you’ll only see the character from behind when he/she is on a vehicle.  Next you’ll head to the Outpost to equip your character.  The Outpost is nothing more than a menu screen, but seems to take an extraordinarily long time to load.  The menu navigation is a bit clumsy and after playing the game for weeks, you’ll still find yourself pressing the wrong buttons to get where you want to go.  Initially your weapon selection is very limited, but as you progress you’ll gain access to a wide variety of weapons including rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, revolvers and bows.  The next step is to select which hunt you would like to take up.  The hunts include challenges such as take 10 beavers within 3 hours with a pistol, or take one male and one female mountain goat with a bow.  Completing a hunt will unlock the next one until you open the next hunting area.  Make sure that you have finished everything in your current area before you proceed to the next.  For reasons unbeknown to me, the developers decided that the gamer should not be permitted to go back to attempt uncompleted missions.

Outside of the Outpost building are signs posted for other challenges.  These include duck hunting, normal fishing and ice fishing as well as dogsledding.  The fishing is not very entertaining at all.  You are limited to very basic lures such as crankbait, with no ability to choose a different type, size or color crankbait.  Basically it’s a one size fits all fishing game.  I’ve done a little fishing in my day, and I have never seen a fish strike a spinner or spoon lure that was completely motionless.  Apparently in Alaska, spinning lures don’t need to spin to get fish to bite.  Throwing your lure in the water near a fish is all that is needed to reel in that trophy salmon.  If the fishing isn’t bad enough, for some reason they included a dogsledding challenge.  You have to drive your dog team to the finish line in the allotted time without fatiguing them too much.  This is one adventure that Activision and Fun Labs should have left on the drawing board.  The duck hunt takes you up a river where you’ll hit checkpoints in which the birds are flushed from both banks of the river.  You have two shells in your shotgun to drop as many ducks as you can before you move to the next checkpoint.  I found this challenge to be too difficult to obtain the necessary score.  It starts out easy enough, but as you progress down the river it seems to get harder and harder until you reach a point where you’ve emptied both barrels of your shotgun, and have no ducks to show for it.  Maybe it’s just me and my lousy aim, but I had a few friends try the challenge and they didn’t succeed either.  Also in the area around the Outpost are a target range where you can sight in your new weapons; and a tent, which represents the save/load function.

Fishing and dogsledding aside, the real meat of the game is hunting.  The hunt controls are basically the same as your average first person shooter and do fine for their purpose.  You can use the left trigger to slightly slow down the game while you are lining up your shot. On the easier difficulty levels, you also have radar to help pinpoint animal locations.  The blips on the radar are green to indicate small game, red to indicate large game and flashing yellow to indicate animals you’ve wounded.  The radar only displays animals within a 90-degree arc centered on your field of view.  You are blind to anything in the other 270 degrees of the radar display.  This can be very annoying when you are concentrating on taking a shot at an animal, while blissfully unaware that a 1200 pound grizzly is charging you from behind (you’d think they would make a little more noise).  I’ve lost many a valiant hunter that way.  The game gives you very little feedback when you are getting attacked.  If you are attacked from behind, you might very well be dead before you would know that an angry moose is mauling you.  Hey Activision, how about some controller vibration the next time my backside is being shredded by a wolverine?  If you are playing a harder difficulty level, you won’t have radar and you’ll have to rely on hiking to an area where you expect your quarry to be, then track it.  Besides the radar, the display features gauges for health, stamina, stealth and ammunition.  Stamina is an enigma.  I understand the need for it when you are running after an animal you’ve wounded, but how does one get completely winded by walking a few hundred meters across an open field?   Moreover, why does moving while crouching fatigue the hunter as much as when he’s in a full sprint?  It makes no sense, but then again neither does having a voice to mock you at every turn while you are hunting.