Motion sensors? Check.
Meneer van n geweer? Check.
Night vision? Check.
A camera that can only shoot in 360p and take blurry images? Check.
Once I took inventory and accounted for my “Bigfoot hunter starter pack”, I was ready to brave the wilderness and take down the furry beast or sweaty LARPer in a suit. Both would make a fine rug in front of my fireplace.
Little did I know the horrors that would await me. Dodgy controls, horrific UI, unintelligent AI and an uninspired gameplay loop that had me running for the hills far faster than any mythical monster could.
We start our misadventure in a humble trailer park in the middle of the forest. There is no Bugatti to be seen here next to the double-wides, but there is an RV that serves as your base of operations to stock up on supplies, check the map, and collect your arsenal of traps, bait, and weapons.
Right out of the gates, the controls baffle me. To select anything in the inventory wheel, you need to swing your mouse around in the general direction of the item, as there is no cursor just to hover over, meaning 9 times out of ten I’m not grabbing what I want.
What is this, Hollywoodbets roulette? How does this feel more like a gambling mechanic than actual gambling mechanics?
Finally fumbling around to equip my firearm, I start wandering around to get the lay of the land. The game advises you to use traps and set bait to attract Bigfoot, but really, all it takes is walking a few paces in the woods to encounter a supposed “hidden giant”. Though the recluse is not taken down easily, he isn’t exactly the smartest ape in the colony.
Often, the battles with Bigfoot are cut short by either him scampering off for no apparent reason, him getting stuck on foliage while charging, or just completely losing track of you in pathfinding, akin to what you would expect in a derelict DayZ server.
Putting these oh-so-climactic fights aside, the game feels largely uninspired. The forest feels like window dressing, while the wildlife seems largely unperturbed by a crazed loony swinging his gun around wildly on the track of the no-doubt apex predator in this neck of the woods.
There is no depth to any of the mechanics, and the gameplay loop of cat-and-mouse has been done far too many times (and better, no less) that it could ever deserve merit here.
Hell, I could name a few Bigfoot games in the last decade that did a far better job than this. Given the source material, it would be wise or savvy to let the “sightings” of Bigfoot or aggression towards visitors build up over a few days as you adjust to his nocturnal patterns, eating habits and other behaviour.
Not to mention diving more into the supernatural in some spooky remote part of California in a presentation similar to The Forest. Or just giving us C4 to blow up the big ape sky high like the yetis in Far Cry 4.
But no, we are neither wise nor savvy nor get to have any fun. Instead, I’m left spinning a roulette inventory wheel, Bigfoot doing laps around the tree while the local wildlife chew on their cud, probably wondering if they are the smartest species around. I wouldn’t blame them.
If you get an overpriced plane ticket, fly to LA and sit in the woods right now looking for Bigfoot, you’d have wasted less of your time than with this game.
