THey are what they are, a conventionally design, with relatively thin jacket and a tip. Drive them over 3000 fps and they will fly very flat but they will also be stressed very hard on close range impacts on big game.
Place your shots well and they will work great. On deer size game, any direct shot to the chest will work great, even through shoulder bones. On heavier game, it would be unwise to intentionally try to center a shoulder knuckle on game such as elk.
I hear all the time hunters using bullets like this and saying how unhappy they were because of the damage caused by bullets like this. All I have to say to them is WTH are you complaining about. They load bullets like this in large magnums, shoot deer at 200 yards and then complain when their is a 6" exit wound or both shoulders are blood shot.
Simply put, you put them on the right spot, they are dramatic game harvesters, put them on the wrong place and they will not kill, gee, sounds like any other bullet out there.
Realize they will expand quickly and relatively violently, realize they are not designed for extreme penetration and take shots appropriate to the bullet your using and they will work great.
95% of all bullet failures are teh result of the hunter using bullets not appropriate for the job at hand or making a poor shot. Actual bullet failures are extremely rare today, EXTREMELY rare.
As far as the 208 gr A-Max. My brother used them this year on pronghorn and Mule deer in his 7.82 Warbird loaded to nearly 3300 fps. The resulting damage to the pronghorn was dramatic and EXPECTED by all of us because we knew what we were doing with the bullet and how it would react.
On his mule deer, a nice +160 class 5x5, 300 lb buck at 250 yards. The shot was placed behind the onside shoulder, exited through the offside shoulder. Again, dramatic damage inside. Offside shoulder was pretty much hamburger, the exit wound was around 1.5" and the jacket was found under the hide on the opposite side. Many would say the bullet failed because it shed its jacket. That is incorrect, the bullet was asked to do a job at a velocity far outside its design limits and as such, we knew what it would do and it performed as expected and in our opinion VERY WELL.
I have been testing these in my 300 Allen Xpress as well and at over 3450 fps I know for a fact what they would do on game closer then 400 yards, make a mess but I know they will also kill very well if I put them where they belong in the vitals.
Kirby Allen(50)