Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013

Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 has the look of a game that you'd find in a bargain bin at a country gas station. You feel it's something you'd pick up, kind of grunt at, and then put it down wondering who would play this. Honestly, I have never had any inkling to play anything in the franchise. Nor do I even know who or what Cabela is. But there have been 5 releases in this series before this one - so someone must be interested.

As one could deduce from the title, Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is all about taking on the role of a hunter in various regions of the world. In this edition, you'll be game hunting in Africa while reminiscing about your days plying the trade in Alaska. It's still tricky to understand who would be avid fans of this series, but you won't know until you play it.

Feeling the Rains Down in Africa

If any unsuspecting gamer fired up Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 and jumped right into gameplay, what you would find is purely ridiculous. The easiest way to explain the game is it plays as an on-rails zombie shooter without the zombies. Instead, you'll find a random assortment of Alaskan and African wildlife rush across the screen, where your job is to massacre them all.

As you can imagine, Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is bringing all sorts of controversy right off the bat. It seems to remove the fictional element of first-person shooters into something that scarily resembles a real-life activity. If you can toss that aside for a bare moment, you can analyze whether the gameplay is actually good or not.

The game mechanics are remarkably average. It's an on-rails first-person shooter where you score a series of points for every animal you manage to kill on the screen. You're given lives that you lose should an animal get too close - lose them all, and you're dead. Obviously, the objective is to get as many as possible as you progress through a big game hunter's story.

The inherent problem with this game is that if you aren't a real hunter, you may find a moral issue with what's happening here. There has clearly been an effort to make the arsenal of weapons and animal visuals as lifelike as possible. It's made to appeal to that sort of audience. But the idea of them being so many out there is a little disconcerting.

Big Game Makes for Little Game

Let's just look at Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is a game for a moment. Is it a good game? Well, the gameplay is pretty average, the story is bland, but the visuals are good. It resembles a copy and paste of an on-rails arcade game like House of the Dead - which explains the craziness that's happening on your screen. It just doesn't feel right as a home console game.

Pros:

• Environmental visuals and models are well done
• Different gun remotes to enhance the experience
• The game knows its audience

Cons:

• Average first-person shooter mechanics
• Controversial in the sense of realism
• Blandness in gameplay all-around