➤ Cabela's: The Hunt - Championship Edition, the review 🎮

The protagonist of this review, Cabela's: The Hunt - Championship Edition, is a video game and as such, excluding those who intend to train soldiers, has among its strengths the ability to subtract action from reality, thus allowing us to kill animals of all shapes and colors without being murderers or, in this case, hunters. The title Saber Interactive puts us on the heels of deer, moose, wild boar, alligators and bears in the middle of the wild North American nature, in search of large prey to hang on our virtual wall.

Gameplay and arsenal

The brand Cabela's it has accustomed us to hunting experiences that are almost never fully successful although always capable of mixing fun and simulation hunting with a discreet efficacy. But the latter is sacrificed in large part with this chapter for Switch that takes the path of simplification, eliminating blood, the possibility of claiming the killed animals and a salient part of the sequences that show us a hit in slow motion. In fact, the radiographic details dedicated to the affected organs have disappeared, giving way to the simple killing after which the animal's body quickly disappears. And it's a real shame not so much for the macabre details, which we can easily do without, as for those cuts that end up cutting off the legs of the gameplay, giving us back an extremely simplified action. Among other things, the suspicion that censorship has little to do with it becomes more and more substantial in the face of the elimination of the influence of the hunter's breath on the aim and the total renunciation of ballistic dynamics, both elements that would have guaranteed a certain satisfaction after hitting a shot. And this is precisely the biggest flaw of a title that simply asks us to wander around following tracks highlighted by light indicators and paying attention not to make noise and to the direction of the wind, since such a distraction could reveal our presence to the nostrils of the animals. In all this there are calls to attract animals, complete with a quick time event attached, and odoriferous traps, but it is easy to forget them given the uselessness. And the same goes for the rest of the arsenal, where we also find a 44 Magnum in perfect American style, with the exception of the arch which, silent, allows us to eliminate a prey without making a noise and is particularly useful when two coveted animals are found. at close range. And this is perhaps the flagship element of a gameplay that offers little else, excluding a quad-bike useful just to speed up the movements and face racing competitions between revved hunters. For the rest we must just be careful not to kill animals for which we do not have permission, under penalty of loss of reputation in the main mode. There Seasonal Hunting, in fact, it asks us to explore a wild piece of the United States in search of prey that allows us to accumulate enough reputation to unlock the next level, a whole new area in which we can find a new legendary prey, a trophy deer and a specific breed of cervid whose first killing is weighed and ends up scoring on the scoreboard.

Graphics, sound and plastic guns

Le ten wilderness areas into which Cabela's: The Hunt - Championship Edition is divided are also populated by animals less prone to being killed such as bears, moose, coyotes, pumas and even alligators, quite common in the swamps of Georgia. And if we find them between our feet, a minigame can start that asks us to hit a series of gun shots while the viewfinder shoots from all sides and the angry animal charges us or tries to tear us to pieces, often succeeding. But death has no effect on the experience and the realization of the minigame is anything but exceptional, which we can also say about the challenges that we can activate by talking to some characters scattered around the game areas. Among other things, these negligible activities bestow too little reputation to be attractive and can be reached directly from the main menu, with a dedicated mode which among other things is the only one to enjoy the multiplayer support. And it is a lack that is felt in the face of other shortcomings in the game. It would have been more pleasant to deal with human users, instead of being satisfied with hearing the simulated shots from the AI over the distance followed by the appearance in the digital scoreboard of the score accumulated by the opponents. Which - as if that were not enough - rarely hit valuable prey and this, combined with the absence of a timer, leaves us all the time to roam the map in search of a large prey, eliminating the challenge. Therefore, the exploration remains, even freer in the homonymous modality which closes an offer to say the least meager, compromised however by invisible walls scattered almost everywhere and by the lack of the jump that forces us to go around every rock. And it's a pity: some animals are animated pretty well, the deer are cared for enough to arouse the right compassion and the choice of colors is spot on, so much so that an obviously limited engine can give us some suggestive glimpses. For this we could also be satisfied, if the glance was always that of the lakes of Wyoming embellished with tons of reflections in real time. But this is not the case: behind every suggestive landscape there are tons of low resolution textures, completely bare areas of the map, extreme pop-ups and even slowdowns, children of a technical sector that, unable to reach 720p in portable mode, does not it certainly lives up to the Switch. And if we add to this an audio department good only for valid environmental samples, we can only raise our hands in front of a title that stands out only for the choice of colors and for the use of Joy-Con to aim to the Duck Hunt, an element that adds something to the experience thanks to the precision of the controls and hitboxes, but takes full meaning only with the additional controller: a rifle included in the physical bundle that further raises an already high price for a title that compared to the previous ones it loses substance, enamel and longevity.

Comment

Price 49,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

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Cabela's: The Hunt - Championship Edition offers an extremely simplified hunting experience, so much so that it is more reminiscent of a mobile transposition done with laziness rather than a title dedicated to a console that has revolutionized the concept of portable. Some merit, here and there, can be glimpsed, but between low challenge, castrated gameplay, fluctuating graphics and poor content it is really difficult to justify a price that is really high, especially for the digital version that inevitably lacks the dedicated controller while costing just ten euros. less than the physical one.