CaptainD’s Freeware Game Digest #2 - Shoot Dec 10 '03 (Updated Sep 18 '07)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line The second in what will hopefully be a long-running series of Freeware Game Reviews CaptainD’s Freeware Game Digest #2 - Shoot Shoot is your typical Japanese shoot-em-up – lots of eye candy, little substance, high difficulty + infinite lives = no real difficulty but lots of frustration. It’s touted on Gamehippo as a flight simulator but I don’t think that description really fits it. It’s more of an Afterburner / G-Loc style shoot-em-up – the only “flight sim” aspect is that you’re… er… flying a plane. Movement is controlled with the cursor keys, Q and A accelerate / decelerate, and guns / missiles controlled with the normal (for Japanese games) z-x-c combination. There are various stages, but to be honest I didn’t bother playing past stage 2. While the graphics are quite impressive the gameplay, which consists of engaging one or two enemies at a time across a square playing area with invisible boundaries, just isn’t involving in the least. It probably doesn’t help that it’s all in Japanese (well it might help you if you can read Japanese, of course), but the “fly-fire-die-get resurrected virtually instantaneously-fly again-fire again-die again” ad infinitum gets repetitive within a couple of minutes. Also the graphics, while impressive (especially in stage one, where you fly among skyscrapers, which is really cool), seem to have mountains hanging in mid-air on stage two… this rather ruined any last desire I had to try to make any progression in the game. Added to the fact that the speedo (okay some there are one or two little bits in English!) shows speeds more akin to car racing games than the sophisticated jet fighters these look like – up to 200KPH – and any illusion that this is some sort of flight simulator is completely gone. Shoot has nice graphics and good music, but otherwise there’s really nothing to commend it. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Japanese-style shoot-‘em-ups anyway, but I’ve played far better ones than this. The only one I can remember the name of right now is The Last Dimension, which you can get off Gamehippo. Yes, this review was short. But there is just little about the game worthy of mention. Final Ratings Graphics: – 8/10 – lots of eye candy but the fact that mountains are to be found hanging in mid-air stop it from getting 9/10. Sound: – 8/10 – The music’s good but will get on your nerves if you manage to persevere more than twenty minutes playing this game. Playability: - 6/10 – pretty easy to pick up the controls, fun for about five minutes. Longevity: - 2/10 – I played it for about 20 minutes and will never play it again. Difficult is quite high but dissolves on consideration of the infinite lives situation. Replay Value: - 1/10 – If you play this twice, shame on you. Overall Rating: - 4/10 – Such effort has been put into the graphics and sound I feel a bit mean giving it this low a rating, but it can’t be helped – the gameplay is non-existent. Download Size: - 4.3mb Where to get it: - http://mkfps.hmc6.net/shoot/shoot.lzh System Requirements - since it’s in Japanese I don’t know, but I would judge it to be pretty high due to the complexity of some of the texturing. I’ll post the full specs if I can find them. Thanks for reading, Dave Copyright 2003 Dave Seaman Please feel free to link to this article. If you wish to quote from it, please feel free but I would appreciate it if you also include a link. -#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#- Freeware Game Digest #1 & Digest Index If Graphical Adventures are more your cup of tea, read my Top Ten Freeware Graphical Adventure Games See also: My Top Ten Freeware Adventure Games (September 2007 Edition) - basically an updated version of the previous link.

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