Deer Hunter

Name:Deer Hunter
Number:126
Year:1997
Publisher:WizardWorks
Developer:Sunstorm Interactive
Genre:Hunting
Difficulty:3/5
Time:1 hour

Let's try something a little bit different. In the '90s, back when FPS titles first took off, many companies made semi-official and unofficial add-ons to the more popular ones. These ranged from CDs with a thousand levels slapped on from the internet to actual expansions. WizardWorks was the most notable of these publishers, and Sunstorm was the company who developed all their Build Engine expansions. These were successful enough that some of the employees had enough spare time to work on a side project; Deer Hunter, a side project that would end up being a really big thing around the turn of the century. Not bad for a company that most people couldn't name today.

Now, I don't quite remember what the earliest hunting game I've played before was, but I have played something this early. If you're unaware, in the early days hunting games were static, no tracking down animals or anything. Just sit down, and wait for deer. I'm not actually sure what went on, but I distinctly remember not taking out any animals.
I should point out that this is surprisingly easy to get working in WINE, but it isn't exactly plug and play. You need to play it in a window, and you need to play it in Windows 98 compatibility. Then it just works. I'm playing the game with both of the add-ons, for as little as that will change

The map screen, if there's something in the right box that supposedly means there's deer nearby

Once the game is running its less than 30 seconds before selecting your equipment and then entering the game. The game has a small selection of weapons, all generic, a rifle, shotgun, bow and black powder rifle. The final added with the expansion. And then whether or not to use a blind or scents. Choices that later titles in this genre would change into items or pre-place them on the map.

What 95% of this game is about

Starting with the first map, set in autumnal Arkansas, I can freely navigate across a map. This is what constitutes movement in this game. Give them credit, they were usually working with games where the AI was hardly complex enough to not get stuck on walls. Moving from that into an effective form of stealth is tricky. You can switch to a screen where you can actually see everything by pressing hunt, which takes you to a screen where you can see and shoot everything around you, but no moving around. Like a turret or a shooting gallery.

The rifle is the only weapon that allows you to zoom in on targets, everything else functions with weird iron sights

Although, that said, I kill my first deer quite easily with the generic rifle. Huh. The trophy screen just shows black, but I can go back to the main menu by pressing the esc key. Guess I should try the shotgun? Well, it takes a trip to the range and a stroke of luck, but once I figure out where to aim the damn thing I take another one down. This is where the game's difficulty becomes...weird.

A lucky encounter with a deer

Actually hunting animals seems to be a crapshoot. The first few animals just appeared, and then I just couldn't find a single animal. This leads into the big problem the game has, on a fundamental level, the actual hunting is a finicky thing. This isn't an actual hunting game where you can track animals carefully and even find ones you already hit once. No, once an animal is gone, its gone. The manual claims you can follow one, but that didn't work out for me at any time. You can't track animals on the overmap, it just tells you if there's poo or a deer den there, which implies that they should be there. What seems to be the most rewarding method of movement is by taking incremental steps until you see an animal. Its this lack of a proper tracking mechanic that truly breaks this game.

You have to take into account the distance, unfortunately, the iron sights are no help

That's not to say the rest of the game is flawless, but the game having an awkward control scheme is less important than not being able to play the game. I could talk about how looking around is kind of crap and you should have your weapon raised whenever you do so, simply because that way it works well, but discussing the specifics of it seems pointless when there isn't a solid gameplay loop to the game. Or how there are only deer and the weapons don't really feel different. Its one of those games where all the small flaws are unimportant because there's one massive flaw overwhelming everything else.

Weapons:
The four different weapons work out as a subtle method of difficulty. Each lower tier weapon is harder and harder to use effectively. 2/10

Enemies:
Just deer. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There are six of them, and they seem different. Even if I tried playing this as serious as possible, they don't really feel that different. And if for some reason you couldn't get enough of this, there's a map editor. 1/10

Player Agency:
Everything is done via the mouse, which works, but there are a bunch of little issues. Because everything is on the mouse, you can't do two things at once, like turning and doing a deer call. Turning requires putting one's mouse cursor at the edges of the screen, unless one is wielding a gun, which apparently causes you to have a worse chance of hitting the longer you have it up. 3/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the overall cheap nature of the game, this feels a lot more like being out in the wilderness than most games would accomplish, though it does feel more limiting compared to those titles. 4/10

Graphics:
Despite the trees being very obvious bitmaps, everything looks decent. Not great, but it does its job well enough. 3/10

Story:
None, like a hunting game should have.

Sound/Music:
Some stock sound effects, the protagonist is voiced, telling us if we hit or if there aren't any deer. The real prize effective background noise. Does a good job of sounding like the a hunting ground. 4/10

That's 18. Very much so a game that aged poorly, though you could easily fix this by implementing a decent tracking system and adding some hotkeys for every function.