Cabela's Adventure Camp Review (PS3)

Each year, as school comes to an end, children across the world start getting excited. Not only is it a time of freedom, but for many it means that it’s almost time to go off to summer camp. Cabela’s Adventure Camp brings home many of the fun outdoor activities enjoyed at camp and with PlayStation Move summer camp can now be enjoyed by campers of all ages any time of the year.

With Adventure Camp, the Cabela’s team is no longer aiming to please the hunters of the world, but their children instead. Keeping things simple, calibrating the Move controller is as easy as pointing the controller at the camera and pressing the Move button. Even the menus are kept to a minimum so that younger audiences can easily set up the game with little to no parental guidance.

Heading out to camp finds a multitude of exciting activities to delve into: racing downhill on mountain bikes; getting soaked in the jet-ski or kayaking water sport activities; or perfecting your aim at the skeet shooting range. Each activity offers up its own unique snippet of fun that’s a perfect fit for multiplayer gaming, with loading screens showing simple diagrams that explain the user-friendly Move controls. Racing activities are controlled by moving the Move controller left and right with the Move button and Trigger used to jump and accelerate, while the shooting games are a simple point and shoot affair. Each activity benefits from the use of motion controls and not only do they make the game easy to pick up and play, but they also add a great deal of fun to each activity as well.

Two game modes round out the package Adventure Camp mode spanning five of the game’s activities over a week’s period, with two of the days featuring mode exclusive minigames: a summer camp rendition of rock-paper-scissors and whack-a-mole. Free Play is exactly what’s expected, letting you take on any activity as you please and both modes can be joined with friends from local multiplayer fun too.

To add a helping of replay value, many of the activities offer multiple stages, with increasing difficulty that will give younger gamers a nice challenge, but older gamers will easily breeze through the entire game in a few short hours. Full Trophy support is featured here and while trophy hunters will rejoice in the fact that they can acquire this Platinum quickly, it’s also nice to see that it’s accessible to the younger gamers too. The addition of unlockable content would have been nice to see, but the activities offer enough fun to keep you coming back for more.