The Shoot takes an interesting angle on the light-gun genre; no slow-paced zombies or generic guns-for-hire here. No, what we’ve got instead is… cardboard cutouts of these enemies. The game puts you in the shoes of a movie star and has you running around different movie sets across a range of genres, blowing away these fake enemies to earn points and – hopefully – please your director. It’s clearly a way of getting around the potential violence so that kids can play too, which is by all means fair enough, but at the end of the day it just means The Shoot ends up feeling a little gimmicky and underwhelming.
There are five different move sets to work your way through in The Shoot. You’ll start off with Western-themed shootouts and later move onto robot battles and gang brawls with some monster madness along the way. While you will be under threat from enemy fire from time-to-time the focus here is more on style than anything else. A meter at the top right of the screen shows how pleased your director is with your performance; getting multiple shots, using special powers, and triggering explosions will make him happy while getting hit, shooting civilians and missing targets will eventually force him to cut. You’ll get five cuts in every movie though, so it’s not an instant game over if you don’t do well.
While the challenge increases as the career mode progresses, it’s about the only thing in The Shoot that does change past your first five minutes of play time. You’ll be stuck with the same standard gun throughout most of the game, which doesn’t give much feedback. The idea is to string your shots together to earn one of three special powers. The easiest to get is Showtime, which will slow everything down once you’ve spun round on the spot making it easier to pick off lots of enemies. Then there’s Shockwave where you fire at the floor to blow up everyone on screen. And finally, Rampage asks you to fire up into the air to trigger a few seconds of faster firing to obliterate your cardboard foes. It’s not exactly a mind blowing feature but it does allow for some strategy, and you can stack multiple powers if you save up which is nice.
Occasionally you’ll have to dodge incoming knives, bullets, dynamite, and the odd rocket or two. You can either shoot whatever’s coming your way out of the air or dodge by moving the controller from side to side to lean. It’s a little messy to dodge; you can never tell what side the projectile is going to land and you never know if you’ve leaned over far enough, meaning it’s much easier to just shoot them out of the air. Without any cover to duck behind, like in a Time Crisis game, you lose the sense of urgency from popping up and down, and are left with something that feels a little more sluggish. You also never have to reload, it’s just point and shoot… and shoot… and shoot some more.
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