Game Reviews

Deer Hunter Reloaded

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Deer Hunter Reloaded

Visualise a beautiful stag, resplendent with towering antlers, standing stock still in a leafy glade directly in front of you. Now imagine a man whispering, "Aim for the lungs" in your ear.

That's pretty much the Deer Hunter: Reloaded experience and - especially for people unfamiliar with animal slaying for entertainment - it's a rather harrowing game to play.

Putting on our objectivity hat (it has a feather plucked from the corpse of a rare bird), the beautiful presentation and plethora of customisation options - from real-life weaponry to a bulging wardrobe of camouflage gear - is appealing.

But even the most stalwart virtual death dealer will-likely baulk at the basic shooting gallery gameplay, grisly slo-mo cam, and Glu Mobile's astonishing number of demands for your cash.

Doe to death

Unlike more realistic sims such as online title The Hunter, in which you painstakingly track your quarry through vast forests using patience and skill, Deer Hunter Reloaded is more like a carnival shooting game.

Eerily lifelike beasts, from the standard deer to larger caribou, black bears, and anachronistic leopards, mill about in front of you, only occasionally moving their heads about. In Stampede mode they run straight at you so that you can rack up kills to unlock new levels.

To make the first-person aiming a little trickier, your basic rifle sight shakes about like a leaf in a stiff breeze, while an X-ray button allows you to easily spot prey and target their main organs (brain, heart, lungs: all the ingredients of a haggis basically).

It feels a like cheating until you miss, which ups the difficulty a notch as the gentle forest creatures will then hop a bit farther away. This forces you to strafe a little around the level to get a new angle before the short level timer ticks down.

Murder for money

If the lack of actual 'hunting' and the strikingly limited gameplay haven't put you off, then the massive freemium costs to keep playing will probably do it.

Deer Hunter Reloaded never misses a trick to get you to open your wallet, whether it be for hollow point bullets to fell bears or more energy just to replay stages you're stuck on, it's grating in a game that's barely worth its free price tag to start with.

Deer Hunter Reloaded

If the thought of shooting innocent woodland animals in slo-mo through X-ray specs doesn't make you flinch from the game, the freemium costs probably will
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Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo