Hunter
| Developer: N/A | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Activision | Sound: |
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| Year: 1991 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Action | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
9/10 | |
Don’t laugh! Behind its minimalist 3D and placid animation lies one of my favourite Amiga games.
You control a soldier, tasked with completing various missions in enemy territory, alone, in the midst of an immense region entirely free of your movements. You are equipped with an interactive map that helps you easily locate your objectives, but also allows you to record landmark points wherever you want.
Three “modes” are offered. Each takes place in a distinct region and grants a promotion with a medal upon completion.
The main mode, Hunter, consists of tracking down the enemy general (within a limited but comfortable timeframe), killing him, and then bringing his head back to headquarters. This is almost like a traditional 3D adventure game, à la Mercenary, where you’re asked to collect key items here and there, or interrogate informants. The difference is that you also carry heavy weapons, encounter all sorts of destructible objects (buildings, animals, soldiers…), and every hundred metres find new means of transport (bicycle, truck, tank, boat, helicopter, windsurfer…), which are also destructible, often noisy, and very fun to pilot! So much so that the mission quickly becomes secondary. This is the genius of the game, and the beginnings of a genre that will much later be called “open world” or “sandbox”, but free from the excesses we know today: extreme standardisation, secondary objectives to the point of indigestion (climbing towers, collecting things in a routine, not to say neurotic manner), fast travel on the map, and more generally, the excessive assistance offered to the player that damages the atmosphere. In my opinion, it is beneficial, to a certain extent, that the player feels lost and left to their own devices (I refer you to my reviews of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Subnautica).
The two other modes are again pretexts to visit new regions, bazooka on shoulder: Missions, successive short missions of increasing difficulty, always time-limited, mostly consisting of destroying buildings; and Action, like the previous missions, but with all objectives designated from the start, you’ll take greater care in choosing the optimal route and strategy to adopt. In theory. Me, I jump into the first helicopter and charge in guns blazing, crash right into the enemy camp … then try to return or at least survive. Brilliant!
What struck me most about this game was its excellent ergonomics (two words I rarely use together in the Amiga section). I was able to play Hunter at nine years old, without a manual. I completed it at fourteen (when I got tired of throwing grenades at cows).
The menus are readable, the commands few and responsive (compare with Midwinter, which I still don’t understand at forty!), and incidentally, I like the mouse-driven inventory management (while the character is controlled by joystick). A small panel appears at the bottom of the screen, without transition or loading time, presenting simple icons and sparing us from learning a multitude of keyboard shortcuts.
I’ll end with a veteran’s advice: be careful not to run over a little rabbit with the car. It will explode!
Its modern successor is called Teardown (2022).
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