(I really should play Modern Warfare 2 at some point so I can take a look at the No Russian mission and see what all the fuss is about.)

Anyway, if you’ve played both Hunting Unlimited titles then you’ll immediately see a huge difference in graphics. Gone are the rubbish 2D sprites and side-on view! Now we have relatively snazzy 3D graphics and the ability to pan around our hunting tower for a whole 360 degrees. You can look up and down, too. Will wonders never cease?

Sarcasm aside, it’s a huge graphical improvement. The gameplay has changed, too. Obviously you’ve got new controls to go with the new view. It’s fairly simple stuff, with swipes moving your view (you can invert the y-axis, praise be to the developers) and on-screen buttons for shooting, zooming, reloading, etc.

There’s also a new element of danger. On some levels bears charge your tower and you have to kill them before the tower collapses and you get your face eaten off.

Nature fights back! Oh, wait, he's already dead.

It’s all a bit odd, though, seemingly unsure of whether it’s a proper hunting game or a shooting gallery in animal skins. For example, I spent a long time shooting deer through the heart so I didn’t damage their pretty faces, but it turns out that you get extra points (and a whizzy Matrix-style view of your bullet) for shooting them in the head. Huh.

Still, once you get used to the game rules it’s fun enough, but from what I’ve played so far it’s not a match for Deer Hunter 3D. It’s early days, though. I’ll give it some more time. (I’ve also got the African safari version of Deer Hunter 3D on my phone ready to go, so I’ll try to play that soon to compare.)

I really think I’d enjoy this game more if it looked better. There’s also the whole “killing innocent animals” thing, but more on that my next post.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that I should try a hunting game, so when I saw Hunting Unlimited 2010 would let me hunt in Idaho and had a launch price of 59p, I took the plunge.

The first thing that struck me was that the drag-to-aim control method was backwards. I was trying to drag the sights, not the screen, or vice versa, and kept dragging the wrong way. I soon adapted, though. Just took a bit of adjustment.

The second thing that struck me was that this is one ugly game. Rubbish sprites and terrible animation.

Anyway, I started shooting at things with my rifle and soon had a gold trophy for killing a deer with a heart shot.

And then I got one for killing a deer with a lung shot.

That made me feel very strange – and not in a good way. Slaughtering people I can do without a thought, but getting bonus points for sending a bullet through an animal’s lungs? I felt – and there’s no other word that quite captures it – icky.

I put the game down for a while. And when I came back I was over all that. I got my crossbow licence and went to Texas (you can hunt in all fifty states, with trophies kept separately for all of them) to try and shoot some boar. Tricky little blighters, especially with the crossbow. I got a few, but none of my kills were good enough for a gold trophy.

I’ll probably keep trying. I’m honestly not sure how good the game is, but when I was lying in bed last night, it was this game that kept me from turning the light out and going to sleep. Not because I was stricken with guilt, but just because I couldn’t put my crossbow down.