Remington Super Slam Hunting North America Hunting Game for Nintendo Wii

Remington Super Slam Hunting North America is one more in an ever-longer line of games from Mastiff that use the same old engine that made Deer Drive unique a few years ago. The problem? One can only enjoy so much arcade-style "hunting" before it gets old.

Like its predecessors, this game has many moving animal-shaped targets. Shoot them, unless they're female. "Vital hits" are subjective... shoot a going-away critter in the butt and chances are the game will holler "Lung shot!" at you. Nail another in the face, and you might hear "Heart shot!"

Not bad, but not great.

Remington Super Slam Hunting North America hunting game for Nintendo Wii isn't a bad game, but it is a re-hash of some older ones. Think "Deer Drive," and a number of other Remington titles for Wii based on the same game engine, and you can pretty much picture what you'll get.

It's called arcade-style, and you basically have all kinds of animals moving all over your screen, and you're supposed to shoot them - most of 'em, anyhow. Don't shoot a female mammal, or you will be penalized. Don't let a bear, moose, mountain lion, wild hog, or wolf attack you, either - you'll lose health, and eventually, life.

Requirements for passing the single-player levels vary, from minimum points to minimum numbers of animals to kill, or minimum numbers of long shots and/or vital hits. Some of them aren't terribly tough to pass, while others drove me nuts. Slow reloads, unresponsive guns, and seemingly barely-attainable requirements were some of the hurdles.

I started with the tutorial, which is simply instructional text. I had to exit it to turn off the aggravating music before I could finish reading the second section. With the music off, it's not bad.

I played through the single-player levels pretty well, until Midwest-5. The damn wolves kept wiping me out because my gun wouldn't reload fast enough. After that, South-2 was rough - I had a hard time making the minimum number of vital hits together with the minimum total points.

Farther into the game, Northwest Territories-2 just about drove me insane. Getting the required number of vital hits in combination with the other requirements took me quite a while and many replays, and at one point I had to get away from the game for a couple weeks before returning to ultimately fight my way through it.

Northwest Territories-3 was also tough, but the next two levels (which are the final two levels) were more reasonable. Challenging, sure, but not ridiculous. Heck, I even got a chain of 61 consecutive hits on one of them. Hooray for me.

There are a couple multi-player options available. In co-op, two players play the same 30 levels together. In versus mode, two to four players compete simultaneously, each with his own Wii remote.

A feature named "Deer Call" is a simple timing test. You complete one before each level, to determine the number (between zero and three) of gold-colored bonus deer that will appear in the level. This gets pretty old when you have to replay a level over and over, because every time the level loads, so does the Deer Call test.

All in all, it's not bad entertainment, but if you've played a similar game before, you probably won't get too much out of it. It's the same-old same-old style of play that we've seen in Deer Drive and other games. Time for a new game engine, Mastiff.

- Russ Chastain

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.