Big Range Hunting

In the last ten years, the number of vegetarians in the UK has almost doubled, and that number is set to increase. Fox-hunting is illegal, PETA are steadily wresting the animals from the hands of cosmetic scientists, and wearing fur now carries the same stigma as stealing money from orphans and pledging it to the BNP.

In this context, playing Big Range Hunting is a surreal experience. The object is simply to kill as many wild animals as you can on the continents of Europe, Africa, and North America, and to some this premise will be so distasteful as to put playing the game out of the question.

For those who remain, what kind of entertainment does Big Range Hunting provide?

Shooting animals may sound potentially monotonous, but, as the saying goes, there are many ways to skin a cat. Each of the three continents on your itinerary hosts a variety of activities, like repeatedly shooting a stag as it drags itself away, and exuberantly gunning down gamboling antelope from the back of a moving truck, so Big Range Hunting is less monotonous than you might suspect.

You get to kill grizzly bears in Canada, big cats in Africa, and even extremely rare 'trophies' like the Savannah's coveted white lion. The only thing you don't get to do in these chirruping, pretty, incongruously serene landscapes, it seems, is skin a cat.

Joining you on your expedition are Sam, a loyal and boisterous Labrador, and a nameless khaki clad glamour model who occasionally appears to impart advice like, "I can't believe he's not dead yet! Keep chasing him!" (How do you chase him? By following the trail of blood, of course.)

Yep, that really is what it's like.

But we won't linger on the ethical dimension any longer. As Oscar Wilde said in defence of The Picture of Dorian Gray, "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written." We might say exactly the same for video games.

Big Range Hunting's three levels each contain five stages, and across the total of 15 stages there's a fair amount of variation. Some are gung ho, requiring you to do things like fend off a battery of grizzly bears as you wait to be rescued, while others are circumspect, requiring you to hide behind bushes and keep yourself hidden as you inexorably de-Bambify the woodlands.

In many, there are two stages to your pursuit, beginning with an overhead view of the theatre of conflict and a small circle of visibility, which you move around to search for tracks and quarry.

Once you've found your quarry, you can press '5' to descend into the field, where you have a view over the shoulder of the huntsman you're controlling. In front of him is a crosshair that perpetually quivers to simulate unsteadiness, as a result of which distant objects are much harder to hit than close up ones, and no shot is totally straightforward.

To be sure of a hit, you need to let the crosshair settle on the target for a moment. Unless you're extremely lucky, a hasty shot will see the bullet whistle into the undergrowth and the animal either running away or descending upon you like a shaggy thresher. The skill is in getting the target properly into your sights before it has a chance to take flight or fight.

Big Range Hunting is caught between two genres. If it were a little easier and more accessible, it could have settled comfortably into the Timecop stable. If, on the other hand, the hunting were more refined and realistic, it could have worked as an offbeat, esoteric simulator. Being neither, it's a fairly average game with some novel features that, ultimately, are more trouble that they're worth.

Still, as a game about shooting lions in the face, we suspect that genre confusion will be the least of Big Range Hunting's problems.