Ultimate Duck Hunting Review
The Wii has had some good, even tremendous, games. I'm not looking to bash on the system but it seems like it unfortunately has had more than it's fair share of really bad games. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's because not many developers know how to properly utilize the Wii remote. Or maybe there are just so many systems out there that developers and publishers just want to try and make a quick buck off of it's huge install base and figure whatever the put out someone will buy. I don't know why I just know that some of the worst games of the past few years has shown up on the tiny popular platform. Well, add another log to that fire with the amazingly bad Ultimate Duck Hunting.
Ultimate Duck Hunting was release for the Wii back in 2007 and, as of this writing, it's now 2009. I don't know if it's been re-released by a new publisher or what, but for some reason it has shown up here at The Gamers' Temple and that has made me unhappy. When reviewing a game, well at least a bad game, I tend to think of all the work that went into it and that the designers, developers, programmers, and such are people with friends and lives. I mean they didn't set out to make a bad game, right? This time I'm not so sure. Ultimate Duck Hunting should have never been released, it's just that simple. I feel bad for the people that created it, but my job here is to tell the readers what I thought about the game and I thought it was just horrible. For the first time in my many years of reviewing I feel the need to apologize to all that worked on this game for being so vicious but I really wish they would have just sucked it up and did the right thing by not letting this out of the door.
So. Where to start? The controls are horrible. The graphics are horrible. The sound is horrible. The menus are horrible. The loading screens are horrible (“Finalizing???”). Heck, even the manual is horrible. Grrrr!
Ok...calm down Gary, calm down....
Whew...
Ultimate Duck Hunting tries to provide a more realistic style of hunting. That is, it's not like the old Nintendo classic Duck Hunt, but rather a more life-like game. There are two game modes, Quick Hunt and Career. Both suck. The only real differences in the two modes is that in Career Mode you have to train your dog before you can go hunting and high scores are tracked. The basic idea is for you and your dog to head out to one of six states to get your hunt on. Each state has a different environment from snowy to woodsy to swampy. Once you pick the state you go through a quick setup where you select things like how many decoys you want, what type of gun, what type of camouflage and the color of your dog unless you're in Career Mode where you'll have already picked your dog. Yeah, I said the color of your dog, because these things are important in hunting!
The hunt is basically you sitting around making calls to lure a flock of ducks into range. There are two types of calls; the Hail Call which is used to call ducks that are a long ways off, and the Hen Call which is used to call ducks that are closer. Using these calls the ducks sooner or later will fly over you and then you shoot. If you hit one you'll see it fall out of the sky. There's a limit to how many ducks you can shoot in any given session. Once you have either met that limit or, more likely, are just ready to stop it's time for you and your dog to retrieve the downed fowl. And that's it, that's all the game is.
