Wild West Guns (Wii)
The light gun genre is one with some pretty easy to meet standards. So long as you can accurately pull off 1 to 1 aiming and put enough things to shoot in front of the player, you can please many fans of the genre. The WiiWare game Wild West Guns seems to know the bar is set pretty low, and while it isn’t entirely complacent, this cowboy shooter certainly isn’t shooting for the stars either.
In some ways, Wild West Guns does a pretty good job of imitating the setup of a more casual arcade shooter. Setting up a few bloodless shooting games based on the Wild West, you select a challenge and take on three different tasks in a row, the game totaling up your score at the end and giving you a medal based on how well you did. As you go through the first few challenges, it looks like the game has got a pretty good mixture of shooting challenges. Target practice with a few different types of targets, gunning down outlaws before they can fire back, shooting tin cans to bounce them around the air… it’s nothing too outlandish or atypical, but it does introduce a mode where you need to protect some rabbits from vultures and its take on skeet shooting uses flying sombreros instead.
The set variety initially seems good as well, the game including expected settings like a saloon or a desert but also having locations like a fishing hole or the inside of a barn for its shooting galleries. They aren’t exactly the most creative or detailed locations, but they are packed with little background objects and critters you can shoot for extra points. You can usually expect a few things in a challenge to shift you away from merely completing the main goal, like making sure you don’t fire on civilians or blasting open doors to have more targets enter the shooting range.
Quite quickly though, the game starts repeating itself, mixing the modes and locations around a bit to make technically new challenges, but its shown you everything it has too quickly and it doesn’t even have much left after its rearranged each challenge type once or twice. They do start adding a few twists to them to make them slightly different; the shootouts get a health system in the later levels (a very forgiving one though) and you get a few timed challenges as well, but they don’t feel much different despite these slightly altered elements.
Still, the shooting is as good as you could hope it could be. Point the Wii Remote and fire and the game reacts exactly as it should, and I never encountered any issues with the controls. There’s nothing in the way of reloading or special weapons, the game focus solely on your ability to maintain accuracy and hit as many targets as possible. To earn the medals and unlock new challenges you’ll have to build up a combo, hitting your targets without a miss to build it higher and higher. It is a bit of a shame you can’t play a single level at a time though, meaning if you want to practice a particular stage you’ll always have to go through the three-stage set up the challenges have. The high scores aren’t the only thing you’re angling for though, as the game has some built-in achievements… that just sort of come up unexpectedly during regular play. None of them are really difficult, meaning you’ll likely earn them without even knowing you did something the game considered special. It doesn’t help that you can’t see the achievement conditions until after they’ve been unlocked, so you can’t even try to earn them. You just get to bumble across them, the game hoping its acknowledgement of these typical feats will keep the player happy. Earning the different types of medals is more fulfilling as it can be worked towards, the game telling you how close you were to the next medal up until you’ve hit the highest one.
Strangely though, the game does include a Normal and a Hard mode that are incredibly similar. As far as I can tell, these two difficulties are only different in that Hard mode’s medals require more points to earn, with the challenges and their layouts staying exactly the same. It really doesn’t feel like it had to be this way, many levels having a few moments of downtime or parts where only a few targets are on screen. Making things more challenging would have been a cinch and wouldn’t have taxed the player too heavily, especially on simpler challenges like shooting the flying sombreros. Moreover, the medal system could have very well been a stand-in for the difficulties if they didn’t want to alter the levels, adding either medals beyond platinum (like double platinum or triple platinum) or just making each tier a bit more difficult to get. As it stands, Normal mode is a bit too generous with giving out medals and Hard mode is a bit too stingy, but by separating them it means a player can be content with their Normal mode victories and won’t feel compelled to engage the replayability the game is counting on to extend its rather short length.
THE VERDICT: Wild West Guns feels like it could have been designed to be an arcade game where you pay a quarter for some quick shooting and forget about it shortly after. The shooting works as well as it should, there’s enough places that a quick bit of play will satisfy you, but it doesn’t have any extra oomph to it. It’s the light gun game you’ve seen countless times before and will continue to see for as long as the genre exists, and what few ways it threatened to add some extra appeal like having the achievements and medal system end up being too forgiving that you can’t really engage with them strongly.
And so, I give Wild West Guns for Wii…
An OKAY rating. Wild West Guns meets the expectations of its genre and nothing more. It’s pretty comparable to a game like Tin Star, but while that game had a cartoon aesthetic to make it stand out, Wild West Guns just goes for a plotless grab bag of pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a cowboy shooter. It does have a few oddities, “mad scientists” with dynamite strapped to their body and dancing bunnies being some examples, but nothing ever pushes it into having a personality, and its shooting feels just as standard as well. Meeting the bare minimum standards means Wild West Guns isn’t bad to play, but it could have been more than that if it had kept figuring out new challenges and made its scoring system more compelling.
When all you are doing is basic shooting, you’re bound to end up with a basic game. Wild West Guns puts enough interesting things in your crosshairs that it doesn’t get dull, but it does just boil down to shooting galleries with slower or faster targets moving around the screen. The simple thrill of pointing at something and blasting it away can carry a game pretty well so as long as you don’t sabotage it with unnecessary burdens, but if a game takes no risks either, it will end up like Wild West Guns: too basic to get invested in.