Customer Reviews

Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2006

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great game. Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2004 and 2005, Cabela's Deer Hunt 2005, and Cabela's Dangerous Hunts are also very good. This game is a good one to choose for average hunters. Dangerous Hunts is for beginning hunters. Deer Hunt is for experienced hunters.
The scenery is one of the best things about these games.
It took me three days to complete the career mode of this game.
Time passes more slowly than in some of the other games in this series. Day changes to night. There is rain, snow, and wind. There is no choosing a season in this game. Many of the animals are slight variations.
Animals included are Arctic Wolf, Barren-Ground Caribou, Bison, American Black Bear, Bobcat, Brown Bear, Columbian Black-Tailed Deer, Cougar, Coyote, Dall's Sheep, Desert Bighorn Sheep, Desert Mule Deer, Eastern Timber Wolf, Grey Wolf, Grizzly Bear, Javelina, Kodiak Brown Bear, Lynx, Mountain Caribou, Mountain Goat, Musk Ox, Northern Timber Wolf, Northwestern Moose, Polar Bear, Pronghorn Antelope, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Rocky Mountain Elk, Rocky Mountain Mule Deer, Roosevelt Elk, Shiras Moose, Stone Sheep, Tule Elk, White-Tailed Deer, Wolverine, Woodland Caribou, and Yukon Moose. In addition there are several non game animals such as rabbits, foxes, and black-footed ferrets.
The weapons are .243 Compact Bolt-Action Rifle, .270 Bolt-Action Rifle, .280 Bolt-Action Rifle, .30-30 Lever-Action Rifle, 7mm Magnum Semi-Automatic Rifle, .30-06 Bolt-Action Rifle, .30-06 Semi-Automatic Rifle, .300 Magnum Bolt-Action Rifle, .308 Bolt-Action Rifle, .308 Semi-Automatic Rifle, .416 Bolt-Action Rifle, .45-120 1874 Replica Rifle, 10 Gauge Pump Shotgun, 12 Gauge Semi-Automatic Shotgun, 12 Gauge Over and Under Shotgun, Semi-Auto Slug Gun, .44 Magnum, Revolver, Single-Shot .30-30 Long Hunting Pistol, .50 AE Semi-Auto Handgun, .500 Magnum Pistol, Recurve Bow, Cabela's PL1 Compound Bow, and Crossbow. Note that not all of these weapons are available immediately. They become available at stores in the lodges throughout career mode.
There are six regions, namely Forest, Marsh, Desert, Grassland, Mountains, and Tundra.
In addition there are calls, lures, tents, stands, and blinds.
Some of the weapons can be fitted with scopes. Binoculars, Spotting Scope, and Laser Range Finder are also available.

This is hands down the best hunting game I've ever played. I'm comparing it to Deer Hunter 2, Deer Hunter 2005 and Hunting Unlimited 2. I've also played the first Big Game Hunter, but that's so ridiculously archaic that it doesn't even count as a comparison.
Here are some of the game's strengths:
- You actually earn money for each legal kill, with which you can buy weapons and equipment.
- Great character customization and skill development system: you can spend some points on the skills when you create your character, and then the skills increase automatically as you use them.
- The largest variety of weapons, equipment and game animals I've ever seen.
- Unlike other games like Deer Hunter, you don't spend hours and hours searching for game, only to find the most disappointing animals in the end. And the game also doesn't place you right next to the animals like in Hunting Unlimited 2, which practically eliminates the searching aspect completely and makes for a very repetitive and unrealistic game. The way they do it is by simply creating smaller maps. You'll have to search, but you won't get frustrated. Also, in the easy mode you can turn on the trophy beacon option, which places a marker over game animals, making them very easy to spot. Unfortunately, this option is not available in the medium or expert modes, which is a drawback. I want a lot of flexibility in customizing my gameplay.
- There is a huge number of video and audio options to tweak to improve performance.

Here are some weaknesses:
- Unfortunately you can't save trophies yourself to compare them with other kills. Only the best of each species is saved automatically.
- You don't get extra points for using exotic weapons, like bows or antique firearms. You do get a bonus for a clean kill, though.
- Animal behavior is still not quite as good as in Deer Hunter 2005, but much better than in Hunting Unlimited 2, where as often as not animals start running toward you when they see you - and I'm talking about defenseless little deer, not just aggressive animals like bears and bison. Still, in Big Game Hunter 2006, there's something not quite right with the way the animals act. The creators of all these games should take an AI workshop with the guys who made Deer Hunter 2005.
- This is a big one: there are no hot keys. This makes using items a major pain in the neck.
- The manual is very concise and leaves many important details unexplained.
- You can only crouch, you can't lay down on the ground.
- Weapons specifications are a bit shallow, and nowhere are they explained in more detail.
- The animal info option (which gives you some details about the animal when you're looking at it through a scope or binoculars) is helpful, but they should include the animal's approximate weight and age, especially in the case of antlerless game.
- The tracking system is a bit frustrating. You can barely see the tracks on the ground, no matter how high your tracking skill is. This is the way it works: you press "x" to search for tracks, and if you find tracks within a certain radius (which is determined by your tracking skill) the camera will zoom into it and give you the species, direction it was going and approximately how long ago the animal left it. It's easy to use, but I would like to search for the tracks myself sometimes, that would give more realism to the game. This system also creates a very frustrating problem: if you're tracking one animal and another idiotic creature happens to cross that path, you can ONLY see the new track, even if the old one is still quite fresh. In addition, the absence of other signals (like droppings or scrapings) and the fact that wounded animals don't leave blood in their tracks are somewhat disappointing.

If you have Big Game Hunter 2005 season do not get Big Game Hunter 2006 because it exactly the same. The first one was fun, but I just spent my money getting a duplicate of the 2005.

this is one of the best hunting games that i have owned or tried. works well on my HP newer computer with Vista. have spent many hours playing this game and i like it better than the 2004 and even newer games that are in this series.

In reading reviews about this game at other sites, some owners of this game inferred that a certain amount of computer tweaking was required inorder for this game to run smoothly without any crashes. Having a fairly new computer, over 3 megs of processing speed, 2 megs of ram and a Nvidia 6800 GT vidio card I felt pretty comfortable about my computer's ability to handle any problems which may surface during game play. I did not even get into the Lodge before the first crash ocuured. I tried running the game at the lowest resoloutions; and although I was able to get a little further into the game, it would continuously crash. These crashes are unusual in the sense that you are not returned back to the desktop. What happens is that the game dissappears from the monitor, and a strange chainlike pattern fills the screen and everything just freezes up. The only way to escape is to disconnect the power source, reconnect and then reboot. Activision tech support finally contacted me and had me make the following alterations. Went into the task manager and closed all running programs with the exception of internet explorer. Went into the registry and changed the reflection and shadow values within the game itself.This causes a smaller game screen which can be returned to full screen by increasing the resoloutions in the games vidio option menu. None of this helped, infact it made the game even more unstable. I have just given up on trying to play the thing.I would welcome any ideas or suggestions anyone would have that would stop these annoying crashes. I play Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 on this computer without any problems. Both these games have a very demanding frame rate, and I play them at the highest resoloutions.I think this game could be a lot of fun, if I could eliminate these crashes. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.Maybe someone can direct me to a forum that dicusses problems related to this game. Strangely enough I don't even see this game listed on the Activision website.

I have been a fan of hunting games for a few years now and have played almost all of em. The best way to describe this one is its exactly the same as Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2005 (which was flawed terribly and had issues) but more fixed up without some of the problems that ruined last years title. The storyline is the sdame as last years title and I mean exactly the same which kinda makes me wonder why the maker of this game couldnt make it a little different this year. But most importantly the issues that were present in Big Game Hunter 2005 are gone for the most part. There was nothing really new added to the game for this years release as far as extra features, items, hunting modes, etc. which was kind of disappointing. Overall the hunt is still fun if you like hunting games this one is worth checkin out has a much more detailed storyline driven hunt than the rest of the hunting games out there and the actual hunting is satisfactory.

This game may have potential, but we will probably never find out, as every time we have tried to play it, it crashes in the first 10 minutes. Activision e-mailed us a fix, but like the "Crash Happy" reviewer above, it did not help at all. We are using a Windows XP PC system. Too bad it was a birthday present for a 10 year old. Needless to say, we are very disappointed. Deer Hunter is a much better game...it actually works.