Submarine sims aren’t usually criticized for being unfair, despite the fact that the main prey species - the red-bellied freighter - is unarmed. The likes of DH2005 are more vulnerable, lacking as they do equalizers like corvettes and aircraft. Unsympathetic game critics seem to relish pointing out that digital deer are “defenseless” as if that fact completely invalidated the genre.

What’s rarely mentioned is that most weaponless whitetails are much harder to hurt than most armed-to-the-teeth Nazis and tangos. Deer can smell lynx (and Lynx) at two hundred paces, they don’t stand where they’re told to, and they don’t stick around when the bullets start buzzing. Sure, they can’t harm you, but what does death really mean in the average FPS? A quickload, a tweaked tactic and you’re on your way again. Knowing you might have to spend 20 minutes re-stalking a spooked stag (that’s assuming you ever find it again) furrows the brow every bit as effectively as thoughts of an inconsequential demise.

Read between the lines of many scathing hunt sim reviews and you’ll find a loathing of hunting itself. While we’re neither passionately pro- or ardently anti-bloodsports we do find the games generate some discomforting moral dilemmas. Many a time we’ve raised our rifle to despatch a doe only to notice a dappled fawn trotting along behind it. In DH2005 the bag limit (the number and type of animals you can kill during a single hunt) usually includes females, but that doesn’t make it any easier to orphan sweet little Dainty Hooves or Bracken Junior.

There are other targets we can’t bring ourselves to fire on either. The lions and the elephants that roam across the Namibian map of Hunting Unlimited 3 and the bears and cougars that wander TH2003’s Rocky Mountain wilderness might be just a bunch of textured polygons, but there’s still something disturbing about gunning them down. Maybe there’d be less soul-searching if the developers had treated the killing differently. In most hunting titles the player wears the sturdy Timberlands of a recreational hunter - a person who kills for kicks and trophies. If we were shooting deer to feed frontier families, thin oversized herds, or protect forestry or crops then triggers might squeeze a tad easier.