From the main menu, you choose from one of six hunter models (five male and one female, assuming the spooky-looking guy who looks as though he's ready for chemical warfare is indeed male), select from three difficulty settings, and decide on the hunting mode. Once version 1.2 is installed, most fans will probably find Deer Hunter 5's setup screens to be instantly familiar.
Sunstorm should be applauded for releasing a patch so quickly, but it doesn't change the fact that the shipping version of the game should have been more thoroughly tested. But most of Deer Hunter 5's first round of fixes involve things that should have been caught before the game shipped-racks on fawns, incorrect textual descriptions, faulty animal AI, incorrect scores, and so forth.
To be fair, no initial release of a PC game is 100 percent bug-free, thanks in no small measure to the issue of video and sound-card drivers. The most telling hint that the game may have been shipped before it had been through rigorous testing, however, is found in the readme file that comes with the 1.2 patch: It lists more than three dozen fixes for problems and bugs in the retail version. And the "Multiplayer Game Types" section says there are three types of multiplayer games and then goes on to describe just two, though that's really the least of Deer Hunter 5's multiplayer problems. It says that only five slots are available for immediately usable items when there are actually six and that the primary sporting arm uses up one of those five slots (it doesn't).
It repeatedly refers to the user in the third-person and the developers in the first-person ("We need to make sure we keep track of what sporting arms hit the game animals"). Amazingly, you'll discover a document that was left over from the QA process of the game's development. That is, if you're running into trouble accessing the six items that can be used without opening your hunter's backpack, you might read the section called "Understanding the Backpack Inventory" to see what you're doing wrong. One clue that more time could have been spent polishing Deer Hunter 5 comes in the game's online help file. Deer Hunter 5 could've used some more polish. It also reveals that the company apparently rushed the game out the door so that it'd be on store shelves in time for the Christmas shopping season. Instead, it reveals that developer Sunstorm Interactive has run out of new ideas for its flagship game line. That track record should virtually guarantee Deer Hunter 5 to be a winner right out of the box.
With the release of Deer Hunter 5: Tracking Trophies, Sunstorm Interactive is now responsible for the creation of 10 deer-hunting simulations and add-on discs-eight in the Deer Hunter line and two Buckmasters titles.