Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts (PS3)

When designing a hunting video game, authenticity is one of the most important elements to consider. Too little of it and you’ve got yourself a glorified gallery shooter with deer as the targets, and too much and the player might grow frustrated with their virtual hunt as it takes a long time to find skittish prey. Both of these approaches can work when handled well in a video game, but Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts feels like it found that lovely sweet spot where you can get that authentic feeling of carefully approaching your quarry but without many of the inconveniences of real life hunting.

 

When you set out to bag some game in this first-person shooter, you’ll find yourself in a large hunting range where you’re free to head where you like. Depending on the region of North America you set out to there will be different animals to track and hunt, but you have a very accommodating map you can consult any time. It won’t tell you where the animals are exactly, but it has certain areas marked as common spots for them to appear. As you spend your time hunting the animals will go through their daily routines meaning at different hours they might be bedded or near a drinking spot, and while you won’t always find game when you check a place, you can at least explore the larger region you’re in and be guaranteed to find something. Usually the first hint you’ll have that animals are around will be their sound, helpfully backed up by an on-screen rippling symbol and a bit of controller vibration. You’ll know to slow your sprinting and start a careful approach now, this being where you start tapping into this video game’s smart approach to handling the actual hunting play.

 

Using your binoculars you can mark one animal and a symbol representing them will appear on your compass bar near the top of the screen. The color of the symbol helps you stay aware of how alert the creature is even if you can’t see it after it’s marked, meaning you can keep abreast of whether or not your movement is catching their eye. As you try to approach or get a good vantage point on something like a bear, boar, moose, or deer, you can crouch walk, crawl, or utilize some hunting equipment that’s already been set up like tree stands and blinds that hide you from view. Different creatures will react to your scent or sounds more than others so you need to consider this on approach too, but usually the approach, while sometimes involving slow crawls or coming to a complete stop, won’t take too long and you can get yourself in a nice spot to take your shot. There are definitely some complicating factors to consider at times, hunting Pronghorn in the desert brush makes you far more visible so it is harder to stay hidden as you get in close and up north the hunting ranges have a lot more tall grass and wet ground that will possibly give you away if you need to push through it, but setting yourself up feels meaningfully tense and you’ll rarely find fault with the game’s logic if your prey does figure you out and sprints off.

Once you’re ready to take the shot, there’s still a few more things ensuring that the hunt is still a satisfying challenge. You can hold your breath to steady your aim but lining it up still is a little testy, and there are considerations like bullet drop off and wind speed that really do impact your ability to hit where you’re aiming. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts isn’t too extreme in enforcing such variables and mostly they’re there to motivate you to move in closer rather than try to get lucky with long range shots, but once you’ve fired your gun, there’s one more moment of exciting anticipation as it flies. The bullet is displayed beautifully in a slow-motion travel shot that heads all the way to your target before an x-ray shows the animal’s vital organs. Rendered in glowing translucent forms to make it not look too grisly, you get to watch your shot fly through and hopefully hit an area that will take the target down quickly. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t allow you to view these vital maps normally so there’s some time spent learning things like where an animal’s bones are since they can slow or deflect a shot and oddly enough, despite having a tutorial and even a voice on walkie-talkie giving you tips and appraising your activities, the game isn’t always forthcoming with useful tips until after you’ve potentially made a mistake. It seems to expect some familiarity with big game hunting, but not too much, the player likely to pick up on important details after spending some time in the opening area.

 

While the best areas to aim change per animal, you’ll usually want to hit the lungs as they are a big target, but the spine is a good back-up plan and the heart and brain can both take down a creature quickly if you can land a shot on those small organs. Not every creature goes down instantly depending on where you hit them, and tracking feels like it has a solid balance in place too. The mark for an animal will stay on your compass even if they flee so you have a good sense of the general direction they’re in, but blood trails are left on the ground and will be mildly highlighted if you stand over them. It’s not too easy to spot the blood but not too hard either and you can use things like similarly highlighted footprints instead to hunt your injured prey. Picking up the body after they go down is how you get the credit for your work, and here’s where the systems tied to the game’s campaign and progression come in. To unlock new areas and hunting gear you need to earn experience and gear credits. Experience is as simple as taking down enough of a certain type of animal, the larger prey providing more points in this department. Gear Credits is where how clean your kill is matters. If you miss the vitals but still take down an animal, you actually lose 75 credits, and since shooting the stomach is viewed as a cruel way to kill game, it comes with a 100 credit penalty. Leaving a downed animal instead of claiming it costs a whopping 500 though so you might just have to accept those lumps, but hitting the different organs will give you a good amount of gear credits and even one solid kill on a hunt can often offset the less clean ones.

 

One of the few sticking points in Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts is that the gear credit system does get off to a bit of a rough start. As you’re learning the ropes you’re not likely to earn a significant amount of credits and can even actively lose them, and the starting rifle you’re given has pretty poor bullet penetration so you’ll probably be hitting bones or not having your shot dig in deep enough to even touch a lung. A bit of work can eventually get you the credits needed to buy better ammunition or a stronger rifle, and then things will smooth out a bit more as the effectiveness of your shooting comes down more to good aiming and approaches. However, later areas will introduce things like moose and caribou where you’ll again likely find the cheaper gear isn’t as powerful as you’d like, and this actually leads to a fairly effective form of motivation for the player. You can definitely feel the shift in strength as you can afford new equipment and landing a beautiful shot is all the more satisfying when you know you just got a big bump towards getting a powerful new hunting option. More importantly, some later hunts have actual gear requirements, so while you might not have been tempted too much by those stronger binoculars or animal calls otherwise, the game makes sure you eventually do buy them and soon realize the impact they have on your effectiveness. Hunting with something like an elk or moose call does seem to make the bucks you’re trying to bag line themselves up a little too nicely, but they’re not a guaranteed tool to success either and play pretty well into the game’s structured hunt system.

At any time the player is allowed to do free hunts in the regions of North America they’ve unlocked, their rewards tied exclusively to the quality of what they catch and the player gets to choose what they want to target. Ammo is pretty limited and there is technically a time limit, but you can get a huge haul if you play your cards right and this feels like it’s meant to be where you spend a good deal of playtime, especially since there are side objectives like hunting small game such as rabbits and foxes who don’t appear on maps and admittedly feel a bit like an afterthought since they’re simple to take out when you spot them. If you want to get gear credits quickly though, you can take on the structured hunts represented by white animal icons on the area selection screen. These have specific conditions you need to meet, and while some low paying ones are just about taking out a few of a certain animal type, you’ll start getting more restrictive requests like needing to catch three moose by luring them within 50 yards with a call, all while having much less time than you would on a normal hunt. You might be asked to go bow hunting which has its own mechanics to learn and consider, and luckily these are entirely optional since some have very tight requirements despite the reward for completing it often being scaled appropriately. Some of the tensest hunts in the game can be found trying to complete these special objectives though, the added pressure making your approach strategies more important and likely pushing you to take interesting risks. This is also the only area where the threat animals pose to you really seems to matter. If a bear or moose charges you and takes you out, your hunt comes to an immediate end but you’re just fine to go again after, the player even keeping all the trophies, points, and credits earned before that injury. In a structured hunt though, a mad animal running you down can mean you miss out on completing a goal you might have been part way through, giving some teeth this otherwise rather toothless feature.

 

Pro Hunts are the star of the campaign though and often what you’re building up towards most by earning experience and upgrading your gear. There are eight in total in the so-called Pro Hunts Slam and these are hosted by some real world figures in the hunting scene. Jim Shockey, Wade Middleton, or the husband and wife pair of Ralph and Vicki Cianciarulo will introduce a hunt against a tougher animal, these Pro Hunts taking place in far more restricted ranges and often with more stringent conditions. There will often be a small opening where you need to land your shot just right or you’ll spook the target and admittedly some of these have a bit too much waiting. Hogzilla is a good Pro Hunt though as you need to very carefully approach the huge boar to get in real close with your bow, the game giving you agency more than some like the first hunt against an oft-hunted deer named Pincushion where you just sit in a tower waiting for the right moment to snipe it. They might not all be the most exciting, especially since retrying a mission can be a bit slow due to load times, but they are often at least a neat capstone to working your way up through a region’s available animals. The southwest’s desert does feel a bit weak with only deer and pronghorn compared to the other three regions often having a mix of various large game, but the campaign applies the right amount of structure to your hunting experience as you are often making your own success while the Pro Hunts ensure you really know what you’re doing through their strict limitations.

 

I wish I could stop here and just give Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts a Good rating, but unfortunately this game’s enjoyability is marred by some technical problems. The ones that dampen the experience most involve the game freezing up, sometimes just for a few seconds and at other times to the point you’ll need to reset the PlayStation 3 system entirely. While out hunting you might experience brief moments where the game freezes up and they often come in a set of three or four, and it does seem like it might be tied to trying to load in animals you can’t even see yet so it’s at least not likely to come up while you’re actually setting up a shot. The problem with a full on freeze though is you can lose a good haul or have a proper hunt’s progress damaged, although it does seem like finishing your hunt after those initial temporary freezes and resetting the console does buy you some more time. More directly impacting the play are the occasional unusual behaviors from the prey you’re trying to take down. Some animals can get stuck in unusual animations, unrealistically moving their heads back and forth or rising and falling in odd ways as their standing position is being disrupted by unusual terrain. This can directly impact lining up your shot, but at least they can sometimes break out of these issues if their alert level shifts. The last issue can almost be seen as a strategy, as resting up on a rock can actually confuse a charging animal. A bear who decides to rush you down can barrel towards that rock it should be easily able to climb up on like you did, but instead it will come to a complete stop in front of you, sometimes even nicely standing up as you take your time lining up a shot on this very accommodating bear who was previously aiming to kill you. These vantages aren’t guaranteed and your unseen hunter isn’t exactly an acrobat, but the bear should at least have been able to determine it can’t reach you like it does if it spots you in a tree stand and change its tactics. The freezing definitely feels like it extracts the largest toll of these problems, but they do unfortunately bring down a hunting game that had a surprisingly strong showing in how it captured the sport.

THE VERDICT: Once you’ve found your footing in Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts the hunting it offers finds an excellent balance between needing to play it safe and actually being able to hunt down your targets in a reasonable amount of time. The many systems influencing your shots and the value in the rewards for being spot-on when you fire makes each slow-motion bullet or arrow flight into a moment of nervous excitement, the gear credits system a smart way to encourage taking on special hunts and punishing sloppy play. Sadly, the frequency of full-on game freezes means it can’t quite get the high marks it deserves, this well-conceived hunting simulator unfortunately having technical problems that are hard to overlook.

 

And so, I give Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts for PlayStation 3…

An OKAY rating. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts does at least at times seem to realize its Pro Hunts should give you more freedom in how you approach them and it’s not too hard to move on if some random deer’s head movement is glitching out, but the outright freezes and the load times are a poor pair. The large areas certainly needed some time to load in and the game does a good job of tracking all previously spotted animals in case you do want to hunt down a herd you spooked previously by their footprints, but it seems the coding in the back end couldn’t completely keep up with the ambition and the shaky moments are a bit too disruptive to the experience. You’ll be spending a good deal of time out on the hunts even though they are managed well to not take too long even when the prey is being a bit more difficult than usual, and similarly when you’re starting out with your weak gear it can be easy to lose faith in the game and think you’re not missing much by your first full system freeze. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts really does have a strong understanding on how to realize big game hunting in an entertaining but somewhat realistic manner though, the player needing to consider a good range of variables and play things carefully to bag the big trophies but you can figure things out easily enough through some early experimentation and observation. You’ll know why you missed a vital organ or why you spooked a herd into running off and it’s more satisfying to land a nice shot because it’s something you had to set up right. The actual tangible gear rewards definitely add a lot to it too as you get bullets that dig deeper and can simplify later work, but the hunts with rules still put you in situations where you are willing to accept restrictions in the sake of big payouts. The Pro Hunts could have done with being more exciting considering they’re the marquee element of this hunting sim, but the hunting is already enjoyable enough without them and they play well into the game’s campaign structure to make attempting a hunt at least exciting as you know it means progress and a huge credit haul can come your way if you clear them.

 

Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts would probably still come as an easy recommendation for fans of hunting simulators who want something near to reality but properly adjusted to work well within a video game format, and there’s even a harder “authentic” difficult to tip things further towards realism if you want a little more challenge. The PC version unfortunately takes the technical problems even further though, players reporting it just stops working entirely after they hit the 30 hour mark in playing it, and it just seems this game’s lot will be that the technical chops weren’t fully up to snuff in realizing the concept. You can still find fairly long stretches where nothing goes awry that means this can at least be worth a look, especially if you approach the game in short sessions where freezes are less likely to drag things down. There’s a good game inside Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts, and while you’ll sometimes be kept from it, there’s still some hunting action worth experiencing in this PS3 Cabela game.