As far as success stories go, the Deer Hunter series is one of the unsung heroes of the early 2000s. A title aimed more towards casual players (to say the least), the original Deer Hunter was released in 1997 and sold over a million copies on PC, on the back of a tiny development budget. Fast forward to 2017, and there have been countless ports, sequels, spin-offs, and compilations, developed by various teams, but all featuring the Deer Hunter name. The most recent of these is Glu?s Deer Hunter Reloaded for mobile devices.
The progression from that title to this PlayStation 4 release of the same name is somewhat unclear, given the five-year gap between the two and the fact that some features from the mobile game are absent here. Either way, Deer Hunter Reloaded on PS4 feels like a bad mobile port. Right from the get-go, the graphical performance is sub-standard, with textures that sometimes load a long time after they should have done and then look blurry and messy when they do. There?s a fair amount of skipping and glitching to be found, too. It?s surprising, given that the game genuinely isn?t attempting a great deal of pixel-pushing work, to the point that the final product looks like it could have come out of the previous generation, or even the one before that. Whether you?re hunting in Texas, Colorado, or Alaska, the locations aren?t exactly dynamic or bustling with life, to the point that everything outside of your immediate range of motion may as well be a still ph...