Er. We’ve been a bit quiet lately. Sorry about that.  I have a few unfinished articles queued up.  In keeping with the Hallowe’en theme, one is on why Resident Evil is bloody horrible, and not in the way it intended.  For now, though, I couldn’t resist talking about this…

Yeah. Innovative.

Hunting Frenzy is a hunting game.  Or, as the title of its press release calls it, “a downloadable animal-blaster aimed at youngsters.”  Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

Ordinarily when an unspeakably awful press release lands in my inbox, I’ll ignore it.  But something about the tremendousness with which this one defies all belief compelled me to finish reading.

It’s obviously translated.  But I can’t help but assume it was written in a completely broken form of its mother-tongue, then translated verbatim.  Which is presumably why its developers claim it to have “completely unique gameplay mechanics,” when actually it’s the sort of thing we’ve seen before a hundred times, and a lot better.

“The game has innovative twist that breaks apart of what has seen until now,” says the press release.  And the twist is… that… “The audience of this game are kids but the adult can enjoy this game as well.”  Tremendous!  So, it’s not just aimed at kids!  Adults can have fun killing innocent animals as well!  I don’t want to get all activist on everyone – and sure, the game is about animals killing other animals, rather than the dispicable man versus beast kind of hunting – but it strikes me as impossibly strange to market a hunting game at children.  A really, really strange idea.

“In this game the hunter should urgently rush & invade the hunt & all of a sudden hunt the same,” screams the press release.  Man!  It sounds urgent.  Presumably too urgent to bother paying a translator.

“But hunter should be very careful because the hunt my escape but in liue of the same the sharp cactus and the cactus encounter and face cactus & be killed.”

I have no idea what that means.

So, of course, I played the game.  Which, by the way, costs $20.

In it, you play as one of various animals, for some reason perched on a wire, suspended in the countryside.  In the first level, I was a lion.  Perched on a wire.  Yes.  My objective was to swoop down and eat sheep as they appeared out of thin air.  Then, um, somehow launch fifteen metres back up into the air to the wire.

A clock ticked down from one minute in the bottom right corner.  After 23 seconds, apparently completely at random, the level ended.  And I moved onto level 2.  Where exactly the same thing happened, only with more sheep and, this time, cacti to pose as an obstacle.  In the middle of a field of grass.  The third level added bombs.  The fourth level is where I switched off.

It’s astonishingly, impossibly rubbish.  To think this is being marketed as a full-price downloadable game is baffling.  It’s of the quality of those Flash games you find on utterly terrible websites, that provide a 30-second diversion before you forget about them forever.  Only it’s worse, because there’s no semblence of a rule-set or structure whatsoever, the menus are littered with typos, and there’s no way to quit the game after you’ve started a level except to bring up the task manager.

It’s quite special.  You should totally try out the demo.