Deer Hunter 4: African Safari

Language is a powerful tool. Just by adding or altering one word you can change the emphasis of a sentence, and alter the meaning of a statement - even if the meaning of the individual word doesn’t change in the process.

So you won’t be doing any ‘killing’ in Deer Hunter 4: African Safari I’m afraid to say. Instead, you’ll be ‘bagging’ lions and ‘Head Zone Shot’-ing Rhinos, and ‘enjoying’ it as you do so.

Actually, that last one’s my own addition.

Rather than picking your way through babbling brooks beside sweeping forests as with earlier Deer Hunter titles, African Safari is all about the ‘big game’ - lions, rhinos, et al - and the deer-like Kudu that you’ll end up having to go for when you’re running out of light and desperate to get that last kill - I mean ‘bag’.

Each day of the safari takes place over the course of one day, with the idea being to beat a set points total with a limited number of trophies.

Points are gained by strongly petting animals with bullets, arrows, or slugs from your assortment of weapons, with a higher score awarded for bigger, heavier creatures and skilful shots.

Head (Zone) shotting a Kudu with the bow, for instance, will net more points than a carefully scoped hunting rifle to the legs of a baby lion, even if such an act would score a higher moral outcry from the WWF in real life.

Track and field

Gameplay starts by sweeping across a map and placing tracking cameras down in good spots, looking for dots that mark out an animals tracks. Once located, play then switches to the familiar first-person viewpoint, with your weapon of choice (selectable via the ‘2’ key) resting at the bottom of the screen.

Once you locate your prey in the attractive, rotatable 360 degree environment, a quick stab on the ‘5’ key raises the sights/scope.

Things are made noticeably more difficult than point-and-shoot thanks to the twin menace of barrel sway and wind, with the former subdued temporally with the ‘1’ key and the latter tamed by canny aiming.

Hunting the hunter

It’s this combination of the anticipation of netting a kill and the act of doing so that makes Deer Hunter 4 a fun mobile title.

With time against you on many trips, making the call between waiting for larger prey and shooting at what you’ve got in front of you - and risk missing both the target score and the target itself - adds tension to an already sweaty shooting mechanic.

It’s a little frustrating, then, that the information on ‘tagged’ animals displays so slowly, both on the map and while aiming, as this is the main factor when making these calls. The decision on the part of the developer to lock out the harder difficulties is also questionable, as the initial two are a walkover.

There’s also the fact that this is, for all intents and purposes, Deer Hunter 3 again, only with different scenery. That doesn’t stop African Safari from being another enjoyable mobile outing, but a few more radical changes are needed before it can take home the bigger trophies.