Deja Vu All Over Again - Cabela's Survival

Not all game developers are looking to take chances with inventive new mechanics and bold new designs. Some are just out to make more money on what's tested and proven to work (or at least, proven to sell). It's how the same sports and shooting games get released and sold year after year, and it's at least in part why Cabela's Survival: Shadows of Katmai came to be.

I just got this game on a whim, hoping to get a little more use out of my Wii. I've played about an hour and a half into the story mode, and while I kind of enjoyed it so far, I have plenty of complaints. My chief complaints: lack of originality and immersion.

Climbing and exploring seem to be key to story mode, but the camera makes it clear that you can only "explore" along a very narrow linear path. What's more, the climbing mechanics, which make up the bulk of your time outside of shooting things, are blatantly copying more successful adventure games like Ico/Shadow of the Colossus. Even Logan's posture while climbing looks almost identical to Ico's. The trouble is that Ico's ledge-scaling mechanics made sense in a giant castle. Logan's on the side of a mountain in the Alaskan wilderness, so seeing all these perfectly horizontal grooves and ledges cut into the mountainside just looks unnatural.

Aside from that, the chief aesthetic is supposed to be the feeling that you're fighting to survive, but it doesn't feel like that at all. The constantly-regenerating health and abundance of checkpoints are part of the problem, but I blame the lack of immersion mainly on Logan's adventure-game-style movement. He runs through several feet of snow as fast as he would on a paved road, has near-perfect grip while climbing and jumping between ledges, and he has a running long-jump that would win Olympic gold medals. These things would make sense in fantasy-oriented games, but in this game they feel out of place and ruin any chance of immersion.

This isn't an outright bad game, but it's far from being really good. I was laughing more often than not, both at the gameplay and the characters, so it's nowhere near the aesthetic the developers were looking to create. The mechanics can be somewhat fun still, but seeing as both the climbing and the shooting elements have been done much better by other games, there's no real reason to play this one. It's just trying to cash in on the Cabela's brand recognition among fans of shooters, while at the same time hoping the survival gimmick will draw in other gamers. I guess they at least suckered in one.