It's a sign of the times in old Blighty that keeping up with the Joneses and moving up the social ranks is no longer measured by how many dead animals you have hanging upon the walls of your stately home, but more how many cushions you could afford on your last trip to Habitat.
You don't see many bear skins on 2-for-1 offers in that store.
Indeed, the sport of hunting isn't quite the force it used to be on these shores, but fans of firing at living fluff for fun still have plenty of arenas to test their skills out in. Glu's Deer Hunter franchise proves more than apt enough in that regard.
With few frills, Deer Hunter 3 lets you scope set areas for an assortment of wildlife to take down. The game essentially falls into a set routine that's fairly easy to pick up, thanks to a consummate opening tutorial round.
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In each area, you're first given an aerial view, the idea being to scan the locale for dots that show the position of any possible targets. Once you've found one, a quick tap of the '5' key takes you to the location in question, each one consisting of a vista that you can scan a full 360 degrees.
Spotting a deer or bear is the aim. Once you have one in your sights you must hit the '0' key to bring up your binoculars so you can mark them off, with weight and distance logged for you.
This is then followed up by actually taking them out with your equipped weapon. Spraying a deer friendly scent (amongst other available tactics) is a good way of enticing them in so you can get a clearer shot.
It's all fairly routine stuff, each area completed once your bags are full of enough flesh or time runs out. Successfully tackling the opening United States outing unlocks the Canada stage, and so on.
There are also a few bonus rounds to keep the trigger happy entertained, a Challenge mode that gives you set targets to hit in a time frame, and a shooting gallery - perfect for practice - that simply streams leagues of deer across the screen in a typically carnival-like fashion.
To its credit, Deer Hunter 3 looks the part, and the game's population of deer react in a realistic manner. Scoping them out while they slowly flitter about the map before coming into range is an art.
Nevertheless, Deer Hunter 3 does feel a little light overall, the main mode needing a little extra meat to ensure it qualifies as the full hunting hoopla.
The game's not bad, but it gets to be the same old routine very quickly. And, on my Blackberry (not sure if this happens on other phones) it freezes any time I shoot a bird - the bird falls and just before it hits the ground the game freezes up. It sucks because you have to finish each challenge before it will unlock the next one, and I'm at a challenge involving shooting 10 birds, so that's it - I can't complete any more.
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