Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 (GameCube)
In a hunting game, you can often expect to track an animal, quietly approach your target, and then try to land your shot in something vital to cleanly take down your kill. In Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 though, most of the animals you’ll be shooting at are charging right towards you and there’s almost never a need to move cautiously because of it. Less of a hunting game and more a first-person action game where you are blasting wild animals right in their face, you won’t get an experience true to life, but you’ll definitely get your chance to take down plenty of wolves, lions, and bears across its short adventure.
Funnily enough, you could say the story of Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 does a better job focusing on tracking a person than it does animals. Playing as a mostly unseen hunter who never speaks, you’ll be looking for an old friend of yours named “Bullseye” Bill Lewis, traveling across the globe to places like India, Australia, and Siberia as you learn what caused Bill Lewis to disappear. While you’ll also have a few run-ins with poachers along the way and meet some guides with a bit of personality like the posh British hunter Reginald and the aboriginal Wirake who undermines him with subtitled sarcasm for a completely imagined click and whistle language, mostly your globe-trotting will be about pitting you against new forms of wildlife. Guides are a bit more important to the story since some portions will ask you to protect both yourself and whoever is accompanying you, but it’s actually fairly easy to weather plenty of attacks from most of the predators that attack you, something likely done to account for how often they’ll ambush you. If you do get killed by an animal though, you will at least get the amusingly phrased message that you were “reduced to silence” by that creature rather than killed before the mission restart, but with how small most levels are, even a death to something like a quicksand pit can be easily recovered from.
Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 will give you a few different weapons across the adventure, some like shotguns and rifles at least feeling pretty appropriate for hunting while the handgun plays more into the game’s emphasis on survival. There are a few dedicated sniping sections that do help some weapons stand out for reasons beyond just being stronger or faster to fire, sniping hogs from a helicopter requiring some timing or liberal use of the slow-down power that can be activated fairly freely by pressing the L button. However, there’s also sniping sections like protecting one of your guides from a wolf attack where the wolves slowly and steadily approach, making for a rather boring wait in a game that usually seems more eager to thrust you in danger or have you walk around an area anticipating potential ambushes. There are efforts to make the areas you explore feel distinct beyond the wildlife, the earlier mentioned quicksand and other hazards like bear traps meant to make you more cautious while some sections take place in the back of a truck where you fire at some particularly ornery lions or an elephant stampede. Endangered animals are sometimes treated more carefully though, tigers and elephants needing to be tranquilized instead of mowed down and even shooting them too many times with a tranquilizer rifle will cause a mission failure for going against the rules of hunting. However, there are also segments where you will pull out a knife to slash up dingoes, so it feels more like the game skirting some ethical issues with certain animals while also getting to include them on your wild hunts across the world.
Sadly, the differences between animals can often feel rather minor. A lion, wolf, tiger, or hyena will all pretty much attack you in the same way, lunging at you and backing off before lunging again. Bears can at least rear up briefly to set them apart in a mostly insignificant way, but most of the predators you’d expect to be hunting essentially just serve as video game enemies where you need to be quick on the trigger and try to manage their numbers when they come in packs. Ammo can be restricted at points to potentially force a bit more accuracy from you or make you lean on weaker firearms for awhile, so while you are a very brazen hunter, you’re not just some one man army eradicating the local wildlife. A few creatures can get a bit more unique too, like Scrub Bulls that charge you with less trepidation and cobras that can spit poison at you if you don’t spot them amidst the brush. There are some boss animals as well, their increased health making them far more of a battle with the final two actually requiring a good deal of movement to avoid a good range of attacks. Comparatively, the first boss you face, Hogzilla, is incredibly underwhelming, far too easy to lead around and fill with lead since it really is just a bigger version of the boars you will have already figured out before then.
Essentially, much of the story will see you heading to a new place to take out new wildlife between the story objectives, a task that usually isn’t too difficult but can be varied enough or have small complications so its more like an animal-themed first person action game. However, there are times Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 attempts to more closely emulate real hunting. A few times between levels you’ll be asked if you want to go to a hunting range where you’ll need to actually be a little cautious as you try to bag a flightier quarry like an Axis Deer or Thomson’s Gazelle. The hunting areas are fairly wide and open, but rather than tracking it seems you mostly amble about until you potentially spot your prey in the distance. You do need to keep a low profile to some degree, crouching and walking suppressing the noise you make and that’s for the most part all that is required to be stealthy. Lining up your shot isn’t too much of a challenge either, a rifle sometimes unsteady when you’re adjusting your scope but otherwise it won’t be difficult to actually hit your target, and Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 still tries to inject a little action into these segments by having a predator try to swoop in and steal your trophy before you can go and grab it. It’s not the best way to include some true hunting in the game, but much like firing from the back of a jeep or sniping hogs from a helicopter, it is at least some gameplay variety that helps the game avoid feeling even more repetitive.
Most levels also have hidden stumps to find and shoot to unlock three survival challenges, although these are a bit of a joke. Whether it’s fighting back lions in the Savanna or holding your own against an incredible amount of tigers on a jungle beach, most of the survival challenges can be easily won by standing your ground and firing at the animals as they predictably run towards you in the same way they always do. Since you have to wait on the animals to even appear its not like you can even turn these into much of a high score chase where you try to clear them as quickly as possible, these unlockable extras perhaps best exposing how plain the predators can be outside of conducive contexts.
THE VERDICT: Once you accept Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 isn’t much of a hunting game but more a first person shooter where you blast away enemies that happen to be animals, it’s easier to see it for the somewhat varied but usually bland action game it truly is. Too many of the predators attack in the same manner so a wolf might as well be the same as a lion, and while you do get some shake-ups like the sniping and car sections, it can still feel underwhelming to see an elephant cave to a single shot you didn’t even have to line up well. The game moving so quickly and taking you to a range of locations keeps some interest alive, but whether you’re doing the true hunting sections or decimating local wildlife populations with shotgun blasts, Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 can’t quite muster the substance or difficulty needed to make these dangerous “hunts” as exciting as they should be.
And so, I give Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 for Nintendo GameCube…
A BAD rating. Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 didn’t need to be an accurate hunting simulator, but it should have at least tried to make its more action-packed take on hunting more exciting. It’s not without its moments, sniping hogs from the helicopter stands out as a moment that values accuracy even with the slowing time power to help with lining the shots up, but the moments that are meant to feel perilous are usually either too gentle to feel thrilling or can be a bit confusing because you keep getting tackled. The short levels do feel like they could have allowed for greater lethality, memorable sections like the Scrub Bull stampede standing out because you need to be on more careful watch and can actually be “reduced to silence” through something beyond trying to cross quicksand you shouldn’t have or not seeing a crocodile between the reeds. Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 can get some mileage out of ammo restrictions, but that also likely lead to how some creatures are made weaker to accommodate it, dingoes hard to take seriously when you just slash them wildly to take them out while they barely can scratch you in return. Truly, it’s the game leaning back onto similar designs for the different predators that seems to weaken the experience. Wolves attacking in packs give them their potency, but taking the wolf AI and moving it onto the solitary tigers makes new creatures less exciting to encounter. Changing up level types carries more of the experience than the specific prey you’re hunting, and having those slightly more accurate albeit low key truer hunting sections work despite their simplicity because they contribute more to gameplay diversity rather than being particularly strong in execution. If Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 is about the danger of nature rather than hunting though, it should have figured out how to apply more variety to the animals rather than just the contexts under which you’re firing at them.
It is possible some people who want to play a hunting game would be put off by something too accurate, a casual gamer perhaps not as interested in the minutiae of tracking and proper aim and more interested in the concept of facing real wildlife in a video game rather than something fantastical. Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2 still can’t quite put together an experience that would cater to such a player, it having moments where it might briefly be neat to see an animal fold easily, but the excitement behind the concept of something like taking down an elephant isn’t captured by placing on tranquilizer dart in them and then watching their body go limp and tumble away. Different level concepts do mean it’s not just a big game shooting gallery, but the action focus doesn’t work too well when the star animals are too simplified to make taking them down satisfying.