Official Website

Platform: Nintendo Wii

Genre: Light Gun

Number of Players: 1

Before first-person shooters were the preferred method of immersing yourself into the action of shooting video games where focused on a different kind of action and that was the light gun. This concept however isn’t anything new and actually goes far back to 1936 with the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite, but the modern generation of video games took hold of this idea quite well. Any of us who were kids back when the Nintendo was released could definitely tell you that we spent a lot of time with the NES and games like Duck Hunt, a title that is still a classic today. Light gun games aren’t gone and forgotten, but they are something of a dying breed though every so often one comes along for the console systems.

Target: Terror is another of those almost unnecessary video game ports that has found its way onto the Wii, not to mention that the original release of the game was back in 2004. Using everyone’s fear of terrorism as the backdrop of the setting, players begin with having one of the briefest and non-informative cutscenes in recent video game history inform them in so few words that terrorist have targeting whatever the given location is that the player has decided to start in. The objective is like just about every light gun game that works on a track system, and you simply move through wave after wave of terrorist, shooting them down and attempting to reach the specified kill number. In the meantime, you must also avoid shooting innocent bystanders and hostages, grab life icons to boost your health, and of course grab a variety of weapons that just happen to be scattered across the location.

The game hypes itself as being something that’s compatible with the Wii Zapper, but that’s one of the many in a long list of unnecessary Wii add-on’s that aren’t really going to add any benefit in playing this or any other game. It’s almost as bad as the add-on packs that I’ve seen with things like baseball bats, tennis rackets, and golf clubs and if you truly need something like this to feel as though you’re a part of the action, I say just get up off the couch and go and do the real thing. All of these attachments are merely a means to grab some quick cash from consumers and aren’t going to benefit you in any way. Trust me, the games will play exactly the same with or without anything added on your Wiimote.

Target: Terror is a rail shooter, the generally seen play style when it comes to light gun games and if you’re not familiar with the idea, the game itself will dictate where you move; your only job is to shoot terrorists and grab power-ups when you see them on the screen. The light gun games from Namco-Bandai, Time Crisis in particular, are probably the best examples of this variety of gameplay, and Target: Terror wants to be Time Crisis in the worst way, the problem being that it can’t.

One of the first things you might notice playing the game is that you start out with an insane amount of credits to continue the game when you die. This may lead you to believe that Target: Terror is going to be insanely difficult and as a result, that might be something that increases the level of fun, but that fact is that it does not. I’m fine with Contra giving me more continues than God, but that’s also the perfect example of a game that is a great, solid action title. Target: Terror on the other hand is completely the opposite and wants to be difficult just to be difficult, something that would be fantastic if the game were fun.

Target: Terror is anything but fun. It plays as a third rate rail shooter at best, falling below some of the other Namco-Bandai titles in the same genre that don’t have the Time Crisis name attached to them. The game features nine different missions across a whole three locations as an incentive to keep playing and if that’s not enough, there are mini-games that can be unlocked, but these are almost worse than the game itself. While moving around, you will constantly be in a position to reload, something that is done by pointing off-screen and firing. This is the same idea as most light gun games, though once again going back to Time Crisis, the premise of ducking to avoid fire and to reload was a nice touch to the series, but Target: Terror lacks this completely. It wants so badly to be retro that if falls flat on its face in doing so. If you’re feeling a bit saucy, you can also try and play the game in the Justice Mode. Here, John Woo wanna-be’s will have the ability to use both of the Wiimotes as guns. We’ve all seen players doing this in the arcades and it’s been done in other console titles, but having it as an addition to Target” Terror isn’t something that boosts the fun level.

What really sets the game back and makes you question what the developers were thinking is the games approach to graphics. The terrorists are actually actors, films and recorded and dropped into the thick of things to give you the feeling that you’re actually shooting someone. It would feel like that I suppose if the enemies did different things. Each has a preset pattern of movements that shows no difference when they appear on screen, but it gets even worse. The costuming is terrible. These guys look like they could be in a low-budget action film. A terrorist wearing a hoody? Am I supposed to be intimidated by him or the guy that’s wearing jogging pants? All of these characters appear against a computer generated location complete with some interactive elements. You can blow up oil barrels, not that I’d recommend it with the price of gas these days, or even shoot the telephones and computers, but even that doesn’t add any degree of enjoyment into the game.

The Wii has become the dumping ground recently for PC games that for the most part just didn’t have outstanding sales the first time around and now arcade games that didn't exactly have a stellar performance, and I don’t think that giving you the option to flail the controls around like a moron will add any redeeming value. I’ve played a lot of light gun games, and I was convinced that I had played some of the worst of these, but I stand corrected. Target: Terror is undoubtedly one of the worst “light gun” games to come along in quite some time and the third rate live actors make some of the games seen on the Sega CD look like stunning masterpieces.

-mike-