Deer Hunter Mac Review (1998)

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published August 1998 and is reproduced as originally written, with the original screenshots (click to enlarge). More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

When Deer Hunter was announced for the Mac by MacSoft it caused a bit of a stir in the Mac gaming community, some people even thought it was a joke. I know I thought “a Hunting simulation?!, they’ve got to be kidding!”, but after playing it I understood why it was a best-seller on the “other” side before coming to the Mac. Deer Hunter is a fun, enjoyable, and not to mention addicting game.

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Gameplay

Deer Hunter is a surprisingly simple game to learn yet very difficult to master. When you go hunting you have a choice between three weapons, a Rifle with scope, a 4-Shot Shotgun, and a Compound Bow. After you choose your preferred weapon you should go to the shooting range to practice before heading out on the hunt. Before you can go out hunting you have to decide on three options, whether you want to use a tree stand and hunt from in a tree, whether or not you wish to use an attracting scent, and whether or not you would like to use a cover scent to mask your bodily odors. When just starting out I recommended that you use all 3 options to lower the difficulty of bagging a deer, once you get more experienced the real fun comes from hunting without those aforementioned hunting peripherals. Once you have geared up for the hunt you can choose between 3 different areas to hunt from, an Indiana winter land, Colorado Alpine forests, and Arkansas autumn woodlands. Each area has it’s own advantages and disadvantages, my personal favorite being the Indiana winter land as it seems to have the large bucks. While hunting you have a deer call, an antler rattle, and binoculars to aid you. As soon as a buck comes into view you have to aim quickly and hope your first shot is good because you most likely won’t get another one.

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Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Deer Hunter are life like, although not as detailed as I would have hoped. The backgrounds reuse the same five or six trees and bushes over and over again. The grounds itself looks like a jpeg graphic that was tiled over the entire hunting area. The Deer, while graphically the most realistic part of the game, seemed to move very jerky and unnaturally. Overall the graphics are decent although somewhat mediocre in parts, you get what you pay for in this bargain priced twenty-dollar title.

The sound of the forests in Deer Hunter are very life-like and realistic, you could almost close your eyes and imagine actually outside in a forest hunting deer. I quickly became annoyed with the hunter’s comments though, he only has a few different parts to say but he never seems to stop saying them, he says them over and over and over.

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Difficulty

Deer Hunter has no difficulty level per-say, but by utilizing the options of tree stand, attracting scent, and cover scent, you can greatly change the difficulty of the hunt. The problem with that is that the hunt then become either easy or hard, there is no medium difficulty. There are cheat codes for Deer Hunter but I won’t post them here because this is game I don’t believe anyone should cheat in as it completely takes the fun away.

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Conclusion

In Conclusion, Deer Hunter, although an unusual game these days, is unbelievably fun and amazingly addicting. Once you start playing Deer Hunter you want to keep on playing, always in search of the seemingly impossible to find 15 point size buck.

I recommend this cheap bargain title to just about everybody except animal rights supporters. You should defiantly check this game out.

Find a copy

Deer Hunter has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Deer Hunter on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.