Cabela's Outdoor Adventures 2010

IGN.com 8 of 10
Cabela seems to have picked up the pace...A common complaint about several previous installments in the long-running Cabela's series of hunting and fishing sims is that they got their simulations a little too right -- they were frequently focused on offering as accurate a re-creation of the hunting experience as possible, and that translated into some really slow gameplay. After all, if you go out hunting for real, you have to spend hours preparing, then making your way out into the wild, then waiting and waiting and waiting for the chance to take, maybe, a single good shot...Cabela's Outdoor Adventures keeps you moving from one moment to the next, not unlike modern first-person shooters and their systems of successive checkpoints. Checkpoints are used here, too, so if you botch a shot and a particular target gets away, you can rewind things and go for it again from the last automatic save point you passed. It's a faster, more fun take on traditional video game hunting, and as a core concept the idea of moving from one critical moment to the next, one after another, works well...Then there's the fishing. This release is being marketed as a joint hunting and fishing game design, which is apparently still a rarity in the industry -- most games focus on just one or the other. This one should have done that too, though, because the fishing portions here are nowhere near as compelling as when you're wielding the big guns...Cabela's has been applying its brand name to hunting and fishing video games for a long time now, and, to my memory, none of its previous products have been real stand-out hits. Outdoor Adventures isn't either, but it at least addresses and common complaint about many of those past games and picks up the pace of the gameplay -- diving into this one is quick and easy, and you can play for short periods of time and still see a lot of action, instead of just sitting around and waiting for hours for bucks and birds to wander by. It's got a few issues and the fishing's mostly phoned in, but Outdoor Adventures may well be a decent option for aspiring woodsmen this season. - Lucas M. Thomas