Review Since becoming CGW's de facto hunting-games editor (due to my past real-life deer hunting exploits), I've been deluged with clone upon clone of the surprisingly successful Deer Hunter model. In all that time, I've leveled the same basic criticism at almost all of them: You can't walk around in the game environment. This is not the case with 3D Hunting: Trophy Whitetail. As advertised, you can trudge through the wilderness while trying to stumble upon an unsuspecting whitetail; but, unfortunately, the game's graphics are so ugly that you won't want to explore much further than the "Exit" button. Yo' Hunting Game Is So Ugly... The game uses an engine similar to the Build engine, which, in this Quake II- and UNREAL-dominated gaming world, looks incredibly dated. Sure, you can use the arrow keys to wander throughout the game's levels, but it's impossible to look up or down (mouselook, anyone?), and the graphics are so pixelated that anything remotely resembling a real-life object is transformed into a blob of brown and gray blocks whenever you venture anywhere near it. Of course, the deer in the game look equally bad, and it is almost impossible to distinguish a deer from the hill it's standing on if you don't use the binoculars. (Even then, the deer is a very unrealistic representation of a real-life animal.) You can forget about being able to make out the scrapes on tree trunks when tracking the deer. The graphics in the Deer Hunter-based hunting games, as primitive as they are, are still miles beyond anything in 3D Hunting: Trophy Whitetail. To make matters even worse, the game runs very slowly, even on a Pentium 166, which is well above the game's minimum system requirement of a Pentium 100. Other than the fact that you can walk around the environment, 3D Hunting: Trophy Whitetail is pretty much just a rip-off of every other hunting game out there. At the start of the game, you pick a weapon (.357 magnum, bow, 7mm bolt-action rifle, or 30-30 lever-action rifle), pick a hunt location (Oregon, New York, Arkansas, or Kentucky), and click on the "Hunt" button to begin your hunt. A score window shows the number of deer killed in each region. One twist on the old theme is the GPS (global positioning system) feature, which shows your position in the gameworld on an onscreen map overlay. Turn In Your License This game tries to remedy one of the biggest problems in the hunting-game genre, the lack of movement, and it somewhat succeeds. But in the end, this game is just not fun. If you're a die-hard hunting-game fanatic, I'd suggest waiting for the true second generation of hunting games, which will be based on the Quake and UNREAL engines. They will play better, look better, and be much more fun than 3D Hunting: Trophy Whitetail. -- Joe Vallina --Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot
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