Big Buck Hunter: Arcade on the PlayStation 4, even with a Lightcon, is a waste of time and barely a game at all. Do not buy Big Buck Hunter: Arcade.
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is bad. It was a bad game when it was taking quarters from players in its original arcade box format, and it’s worse here on the PlayStation 4. While the MARS Lightcon works adequately well as a substitute for traditional arcade gun mechanics, the sheer lack of variety, content, execution, effort, and thought which went into making Big Buck Hunter: Arcade available for current generation consoles is, if nothing else, staggering.
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is bad; so bad, in fact, it is hard to determine what exactly the core gameplay loop of Big Buck Hunter: Arcade even is. The title gives off the impression of at first being something like a hastily slung-together Cabela’s Big Game Hunter rip-off, something made using slapped-on pre-purchased assets and pre-existing AI systems, millions of miles away from the hunting in Red Dead Redemption 2, in order to gain a few quarters from drunk consumers pursuing their local Bass Pro Shop. Equal times is spent inside menus, staring at loading screens, and actually playing the game, something which amounts to roughly twenty-to-thirty second bursts of gameplay, perhaps stretching slightly longer if a “dangerous creature” like a wolf is in the area.
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is bad. The loading screens are ridiculously long for what the eventual gameplay delivers, which in itself is nothing but a short panning view of a poorly-modeled area displaying unrealistic-looking creatures and lasting barely long enough to get the player oriented before the “match” or “round” or whatever equitable real video game term would be applicable to the short spurts of gameplay found within ends, subjecting the player to another jump back into a menu to choose from a list of indistinct locations in which to spend another thirty seconds, sometimes interspersed with long loading screens inexplicably decorated with models in skimpily-clad camouflage outfits.
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is bad. The game boasts of multiple hunting locations and yet they all feel virtually identical, lacking any sort of interaction or intuitiveness in any shape or form. Each section of interactivity plays out in exactly the same manner, seeing the player point the gun at the screen and try not to shoot the non-targets while at the same time hitting the required animal. It is mind-numbingly dull and an insult to gamers at any price, barring perhaps the one or two quarters required to play the non-home version.
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is bad. Do not buy Big Buck Hunter: Arcade. This game, if you can call it such, is not worth the money it cost to develop. The fact that it exists at all as a purchasable PlayStation 4 product should not only be a mark against the MARS Lightcon system, which boasts much more complete and legitimate games in the form of Voyage of the Dead and Qubit’s Quest, but also the entire PlayStation 4 console, Sony as a company, and perhaps the sport of hunting itself. Something this egregious, this disingenuous, this repugnantly atrocious, should not be allowed to be called a “video game” nor sit in the PlayStation store alongside comparatively stellar titles like the glitch-ridden WWE 2K20.
Next: Voyage of the Dead Review (MARS Lightcon Edition)
Big Buck Hunter: Arcade is available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. A PS4 code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.
