Fucking elephants, how do they work?

There’s not much to say, really. I go out, I kill things and I drink their blood to take their powers.

Now I can turn myself black and white and shoot water out of my newly-droopy nose. Maybe I should kill something with something useful like venom or wings, eh?

Actually, an elephant squirted me with water at Bristol Zoo when I was three or four. Let’s call this payback.

So, you start wandering around the map until you find some animal tracks.

Lions can hunt you back, which loses you points rather than limbs.

Then you set yourself up in a good hunting position and prepare to kill some animals.

What's black and white and red all over?

Repeat until you’ve killed five animals or night falls. That’s about it. You can spend points you earn on new weapons, equipment and stat increases, you can unlock new areas to hunt in and, just like its predecessor, you can view your best kills in the trophy room.

Poor little bugger, shot while nomming.

That’s pretty much it. It all works very well and, as with any shooting game, a good kill is very satisfying. The death animations make me feel pretty horrible about myself, but I can live with that. You see, I started off with my first hunting games to investigate a sub-genre I knew nothing about, but now I rather like them. And I’d definitely like to see an Urban Sniper spin-off of the Deer Hunter series.

I can kill people with gay abandon, spraying bullets into crowds, dropping chandeliers on the innocent and guilty alike, etc. So why do hunting games sometimes make me feel like I’m doing something wrong? Why are polygons in the shape of deer different from polygons in the shape of people?

I wondered if it was something to do with being out of danger and being removed from the action, but I’m quite happy to grab a sniper rifle in GTA games and take shots at people with no consequence. I wondered if I just don’t like hunting animals… and I think there’s something there. I say I don’t have a problem with other people hunting animals, that it’s just not for me – but I think that’s probably an intellectual position, not an emotional one. As a meat eater, I don’t think it makes sense, but it’s there and I’m just going to have to deal with.

And I am going to have to deal with it, because Deer Hunter 3D is an absolutely excellent game. Ignore the fact you’re hunting innocent animals and you’ve got a great shooting game. I like tramping round the map looking for animals. I like scanning the environment for them. And, yes, I like lining up a shot and killing them with a single bullet.

It’s just a bit of a problem that I hate it when I don’t kill them in one hit. The yelp of surprise, fear and pain as they buck when the bullet hits. The way they run in terror. The way the tracks on the map become red once they’ve disappeared from view. That I don’t like at all.

Yet I still play, because there’s nothing quite as rewarding as a good kill.

Does this screen shot make me feel a bit horrible?

Why, yes, it does. But, at the same time, I can admire the kill.

I bought this game last night because I couldn’t stop playing the demo. I’m glad I did. In a way, I even like the way it challenges me emotionally.

It’s not making me want to hunt for real, but, man, I want to going hunting on my iPhone again soon.

Not so sure about the bonus round where you grab extra points for killing squirrels that run across the screen, though.

Anyway, the trophy room in this game goes one better than Hunting Unlimited and shows you a 3D model of the animal you killed with the trajectory of your bullet going through it. The line is white on the way in, red on the way out. Subtle.

If the full version of the game was 59p I’d snap it up, but I’m not sure whether to bother for £1.79, what with everything else I’ve got on the go.