Pretty much everything we know about hunting comes from the very depressing, very long Robert De Niro film The Deer Hunter. The best thing about The Deer Hunter was the fact that actual hunting was kept to a minimum to concentrate on more interesting themes, such as war, torture, drug abuse and illegal gambling - the subject of most games these days.

Cabela's Big Game Hunter, however, is a very earnest and drawn-out 'proper' hunting simulation for dads, uncles and our rotund waffle-eating friends across the water, who consume these games like they were 1kg sacks of 'Fritos'. You play a stinking mountain man with a gun who must trudge his way across miles of terrain in search of dinner. 'Dinner' being one each of the 35 innocent animals that populate BGH's forests, deserts and tundra. There's lots of dull preparation to get through before the murder starts, though, accessed via rubbish static menus - buying all sorts of obscure equipment ('urine scent?') and other exciting tasks like reading the park regulations and having a sleep may be 'realistic', but they hardly build excitement. Point Blank this certainly isn't.

Things didn't go too well on our first outing, unless driving an ATV off a cliff and breaking both legs before being attacked by angry wolverines counts as 'going well'. After a while we tired of losing to these rubbish level one enemies and took to flushing them from the undergrowth with the ATV, which only succeeded in annoying the warden. "Don’t do that again", goes his surly, disembodied voice when you do anything other than stick to the game's strictly linear path. And when games we don't like much anyway start with the nagging, we tend to turn them off.

But we tried to play 'properly' instead, which involves lengthy periods of creeping about, pausing to catch your breath, then creeping some more, all the while pressing Y to look for tracks, and peering into the vegetation. It's hard and no fun - until you turn on Tracking mode, which makes things easy and no fun by marking every animal on the map with a big red arrow. This dramatically shifts the balance of power - areas can now be completed in about 90 seconds flat by climbing into the first tree you find and firing a few rounds at the nearest red blip. Six times out of ten you'll hit the poor creature it's pointing at. It gets a bit depressing after a while.

After all the forest animals are dead, you're sent in to clear the desert of sheep, goats and so on. The game just unfolds one area at a time like this, with you shooting some boring, realistic guns at boring, realistic animals, in boring, realistic environments, and at no point do you get to go to Vietnam to play Russian Roulette with Christopher Walken, or defend Burt Reynolds from hillbilly sex attack with a sniper rifle.

And therein lies the rub. On the one hand it's a competent, meaty simulation. On the other, it's simulating something that's difficult and serious and, fatally, a bit crap. If you like long, hard stealth games where stepping on a bit of twig means restarting the level, you'll love it. If you fancied going on an angry rampage as the polar bear in multiplayer, we suggest you buy Star Wars Battlefront II. You get to be the Wampa in that!

1. The physics are serviceable and someone's spent time on the animal animations; one of the more competent hunting sims on release.
2. It's about as in-depth as you could hope for, with plenty of hunting areas, weapons and equipment to get really, really excited about.

1. Can be tiresomely difficult and frustrating from the get go - unless you're playing on Easy mode, in which case it's stupidly simple.
2. Drab visuals, horrible, laggy menu screens and a half-hearted story mode won't go far to making you 'enjoy yourself'.
3. A rigidly linear experience that hasn't had a whole lot of thought put into the structure or design overall. Also, hunting is boring.

A competent enough simulation of a dull, repetitive activity - add two points if you like to shoot dumb animals in the arse.