Browning African Safari

by Don St. John
January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST

Malaria isn�t the worst

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Hey, we like a good challenge. Oquirrh Productions, the publisher of The Browning African Safari, dropped us a note mentioning that we�d left its game out of our recent roundup of hunting titles (�Hunting Big Game,� November 1998) and enclosed a copy. They also said it was the best hunting game on the market. Fair enough, we thought�we�ll give it a whirl.

Well, be glad we did because now you�ll never have to. The Browning African Safari�the fourth in a line of Browning games�is an astonishingly amateurish pass at a hunting game, replete with cheesy animations superimposed onto photo-realistic environments. The action is purely throwback sit-and-spin. This game would�ve looked outdated in 1993, never mind now.

There are actually a couple of decent ideas attempted here. You hunt over a seven-day window, staked to $10,000 by some nutcase named Snidley who wants trophies for his museum. Bag enough, and he�ll continue to stake you; fail, and your game ends. Your funding also depends on your supplies, the trophy cost of your prize, and its rarity (once Snidley has a particular trophy, he pays a lot less for repeats). Even more interestingly, this is one of the rare titles where you�re in some danger. Cross a rhino or crocodile, for instance, and you could be toast. You also have to worry about malaria�this is Africa, after all.

Unfortunately, the action and overall look are so embarrassing that they totally eclipse the concepts. You�d have a hard time not laughing when your cartoon guide pops up to warn you to take a drink, or when an animated zebra rambles through the photo backdrop. Perhaps it�s bad form to pick on a small company that doesn�t have the development dollars of the majors, but it�s even worse form for it to try and pick on your wallet with a game as bad as this.