If you like genuine hunting experiences, exploring the wilderness, or just anything fun, you will LOATHE this game.
The last, and only, good hunting game I've ever played was (and is) "Big Game Hunter: 2005 Adventures" for the XBox. It did have some problems, such as the tournaments, most of which were lame. Sometimes you had to bag a trophy before your opponent did, for example, and often he would shoot one down the very instant the contest began, giving you no chance to even figure out which end of your gun was the harmful one. Also, you were often tasked to fire at clay pigeons, which seemed pointless in a game in which you never had the chance to shoot any real birds. Maybe it was training for bringing down an airborne cougar as it pounced upon your unsuspecting form. Who knows. However, the hunting itself was fun and unique, as the quiet moments of tracking your prey really made the moment of the kill much more exciting and fulfilling.
Anyway, as the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Well, some things that were "broke" in 2005 have been fixed for 2008. You DO get to shoot birds in this game, even if they're only in minigames you encounter as you go along your career adventure, and you DO get to hunt small game now, whereas in 2005 you were penalized for shooting small animals such as rabbits, foxes, and amoebae. You're also not just hunting in North America anymore, but all over the world. The trouble is, they took a bunch of stuff that WASN'T broken in 2005 and just broke the utter hell out of it. Hunting areas now seem too path-oriented and constricting, so if you lose your prey it'll often come back running to you since it doesn't have anywhere else to retreat to. Also, even though a way seems clear, you will not be able to press forward even though there's no geographical obstacle barring your progress. You can't move simply because it's not the way the designers intended you to go.
Even the options have been downgraded. You can't create a hunter anymore, which isn't major since the character creation system in 2005 wasn't very deep, but at least it offered a choice. You're also stuck in third-person now, which might be okay for some players but now you're permanently looking over the shoulder of your character. First-person is just more immersive, and its omission distances you from the whole experience. You also cannot enter water anymore, and though your character in '05 wasn't a very strong swimmer it was still better to have the option to cross deep water at your own peril rather than have an invisible fence shield you from the choice entirely. Manual trophy claiming is another thing of the past, eliminating the possibility of fatally wounding an animal and then following its tracks to where it finally fell. Also, whenever you were tasked with hunting an especially big specimen in '05, that's exactly what you did: you HUNTED it. In 2008 these "Trophy Legends" as they're now called are simply set up targets for you to shoot. You may as well be firing at lifeless deer decoys for all the fun it is. And also, you don't hunt your first bear, you fight it in a patterned boss battle sequence that we've all seen in hundreds of games. You shoot it, then it attacks and you have to press a specific button to dodge the charge. Even if you fail, you're simply knocked over, so there seems to be no penalty for getting hit as you have no health meter. Then you get to do the whole thing over and over, the bear absorbing an impossible amount of bullets before the steroid-enhanced brute finally keels over. Some of you reading this might think this sounds more exciting than it is. Well trust me, it isn't. It's lame. I want to kill a bear, not fight Bowser the King Koopa. You might as well task me with kicking a bobcat into a pool of molten lava, or dropping an overhead boulder onto the skull of a Northwestern Moose. These things are fine in their own genre, but not in a hunting game.
The only gratifying experience in this game is the hit camera, which gives you a dramatic view of your fatal shot. It's really cool-looking, but it's too bad there's just not any game leading up to that point. If you really want to hunt bears, big cats, wolves, moose, deer, elk, and countless other creatures, you're just better off sticking with Big Game Hunter 2005 Adventures for the original XBox. They took the name "adventures" out of this title for a good reason; the game's been mangled to a point at which there's simply no adventure to be had.