Developer Fun Labs has taken their last-gen African hunting game and remastered it for the PS4 and the Xbox One. Is Cabela’s African Adventures worth your time, or is it best left out in the wild to be ravaged to death by hyenas?

Read our review to find out

The Cabela’s brand of hunting video games has spewed twenty plus titles out since its inception back in 2004, and started out as a decent series with a fun concept. The amount of patience and stealth required gave the game an almost real world feel, with graphics that started out par for that current generation of gaming, and even had move support and a light gun to add the the realism of the game. It was never true to life, but still was fun to play, and those with enough patience were rewarded with virtual big game trophies.

Sadly, there comes a time in a series where so many titles have been released that a developer can become complacent and just copy-and-paste an old game into their program, add a couple bells and whistles, maybe rough polish it a little, and release it in hopes of raking in a few more bucks from a tired and out-dated game model. Welcome to the less-than mediocre world of Cabela’s African Adventures.

I’d be ‘lion’ if i said the graphics for this game were average.

The story for Cabela’s African Adventures follows our hero Mason as he searches for pieces of a gold statue that are scattered about through several regions of Africa. The story is told through a combination of roughly drawn static comics with voice acting over them, and through radio interactions between Mason and the other characters. The story was very bland, with no real entertainment value.

As Mason goes around hunting down and killing animals, their carcasses fall over like cardboard cut-outs with Mason not having any interest in the spoils of the actual hunt. In all honesty, the game does more to hurt the image of hunters than New York’s own Michael Bloomberg could have hoped for had he funded this for propaganda. Mason doesn’t skin the animals for their fur, he doesn’t field dress them and take them back to camp for consumption or taxidermy. It’s a tale of a wasteful hunter that could not possibly care less about using these animals for anything other than target practice and just leaves the animals to rot in the field.

The graphics for the game are not worthy of the PS4 or the Xbox One. This game might have garnered some praise if these graphics were on the PS2 or maybe the Wii, but next-gen consoles deserve more than this and the developer did a disservice to both with this unpolished and sub-par release.

For those of you that are just looking for something to do, the game does play OK with its stealth hunting, even though the logic is far from what you would expect in real life. Imagine trying to sneak up on the leader of herd of deer while the rest of the herd wander around in set patterns between you and your target. This basic idea would be fine if you were hunting a human target but really makes no sense when it comes to animals with their keen sense of smell. Taking any of these animals out between you and your target isn’t an option, so patience, timing and pattern recognition are all that are required to reach your goal.

There are quite a few collectibles for you to find and these include upgrades for your different weapons, as well as items that help to tell the game’s back story. Every collectible is pretty easy to find and they show up on the game map as soon as you’re close to one, with only a little searching required to find them.

Cabela’s African Adventures is not a game we would recommend, and I strongly doubt that even fans of the series would find much enjoyment in the title. The game is as much a waste of money as the animals that Mason wastes along his useless journey. Please don’t encourage this developer by purchasing this poorly remastered title.

3