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.
