All American Hunter harkens back to the pre-Deer Hunter days, before 3D and FPS features invaded the hunting genre and turned it into the lucrative money-making business it is today for publishers. That said, it shares many commonalities with hunting simulations today in its use of authentic material and reliance on realistic still photos to flesh out its visuals. You really can’t take All American Hunter too seriously as a hunting game though. In some ways, it doesn’t take itself seriously. Hunting is supposed to be a sport where patience is the key virtue. Often, you’ll go out into the woods and spend more time baiting or scouting than firing your weapon. All American Hunter is very ‘American’, in a stereotypical sense because there’s lots of firing and not much patience involved.

Each stage in All American Hunter releases animals like clockwork. While you have a limited number of bullets, dependent on the difficulty you select (higher levels of difficulty mean scarcer resources), you don’t need to maneuver your character around. Each animal pops out in front of your static view and usually without much waiting. Shooting a prey demands you to position the targeting reticule over your intended victim and then pressing one of the handheld buttons to fire. It’s simple, effective and painless; at least for you. All American Hunter spices it up by throwing in flying creatures like birds. Large animals, like a bear, will take a few shots before going down. Generally though, the challenge isn’t that stiff since all animals will travel from left to right or right to left. Why they persist to do so is beyond me but a closer look at the visuals might provide some answers.

This is one of those games that look great in screenshots. The bright and vibrant backgrounds show up great on the PC screen and on handheld LCDs, it’s just as good. The animals are given similar treatment. Some, like bucks, are recognizable. Others, like badgers, are disproportionately larger than foxes. And bears aren’t as ferocious as a trophy buck. Despite this, the crux with All American Hunter is the animation of the animals. With only a few frames allotted to each animal, you can’t expect much realism as badgers, bears and rabbits stagger mechanically across the screen. The only saving grace is the fowl and animals in flight, since they don’t look as bad flocking in the air. The end result for the others is not unlike animals in a shooting gallery you’d find at a summer fair. However, in light of the relaxed gun play, it all fits in very well. All American Hunter amounts to a fun shooting gallery as you take pot shots at wildlife with the occasional innocent (and humorous) bystander tottering across the screen.

After you kill the requisite number of creatures, which is different for each level, you progress towards the next stage for a slightly tougher challenge. With twelve animals to hunt and three difficulty settings, there’s enough variety to keep things interesting. There’s not a lot timed pressure situations. Much in the way of mini-objectives and missions could be made from that. Aiming, which is tough in real life due to factors like wind, distance, and fatigue, is superhumanly perfect in All American Hunter.

The sound effects in this game are crisp and well-recorded. There are sounds for wildlife, reloads and gun fire. While they don’t vary much, they add enough to match the care put into the backgrounds. The game only weighs at two megabytes so there really couldn’t be too much detail to the content provided. I found myself wanting a high resolution package, particularly for the Pocket PC version.

Ultimately, All American Hunter is a by the books shooting gallery, minus the American cowboy hat. In this day and age, it has much more to do with shooting galleries than hunting as it lacks the hyper-realism now infused and expected of in the hunting sub-genre. Fortunately, it doesn’t take itself too seriously and has no pretense or aspirations to, which is just as fine because it’s an enjoyable shooting game that happens to don hunting garb; something quick so you can vent your frustrations on hapless mechanical wildlife.

Ratings:
[09/10] Addictiveness
[15/20] Gameplay
[10/15] Graphics
[10/10] Interface/controls
[09/10] Program Size
[03/05] Sound
[05/05] Discreetness
[11/15] Learning Curve
[ N/A ] Multiplayer