I have never been a big hunting person, but I thought it would be fun to go through and try out all of the old Cabela's licensed games just for the fun of it. Big Game Hunter: Ultimate Challenge was not the first licensed game from Cabela's, but it was the first released on consoles; so this is where I decided to start.
The game is exactly what it says on the tin, it is a hunting simulator where you track and hunt big game animals. It is surprisingly in depth for a licensed video game in the early 2000s; there are animal callers and scents that you can equip to draw game towards you, at least I think that is the intention; you need to bring the right type of clothing to both blend into the environment and survive the weather conditions; you can bring along a tent to camp out to regain stamina and wait out the night, and there is a day and night cycle, which I find really novel in a PS1 game. But those are really the only good things I have to say about the game, everything else is either just okay or just not well designed. The guns feel okay, the sound good, but that's it there are no reload animations and the view models are a pixelated blur. The graphics, while standard for middle market releases of the time, do not help because the draw distance is incredibly short and it makes the animals almost impossible to see if the aren't right in front of you. The game tries to compensate for this by having giant red dots mark where animals are, but this doesn't really work either cause the dots don't tell you how far away the animal is so you could end up traveling all the way across the gigantic maps only for your target to disappear out of bounds, which they can do for some reason.
Big Game Hunter: Ultimate Challenge is an alright experience, but when it comes to hunting simulators, you are better off playing a more recent one like Way of the Hunter or Hunting Simulator 2.