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Wild West Guns Review
Written by Chris Buffa on Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Excellent wild west presentation, speedy load times, polished tap controls, a diverse amount of mini games, destructible environments, slick looking animations.
Some mini games repeat, game chugs during train stages, no online leaderboard.
Your iPhone becomes the O.K. Corral in Gameloft's enjoyable tap-based shooter, Wild West Guns. Five bucks gets you a series of addictive mini games that challenge you to complete objectives, cause destruction and net tons of cash to move onto the next level. It's both amazingly polished and lots of fun, providing you have what it takes to survive hungry vultures, suicide-bombing mad scientists and a bunch of ornery bandits.
Each mini game forces you to use lightning fast reflexes and a steady finger to poke your way to victory. This involves popping balloons, sniping sombreros, nailing targets without hitting the red ones, killing vultures before they make off with cute bunny rabbits and blasting criminals inside a saloon. Furthermore, all of the game's stages feature destructible elements that you can shoot for cash. So long as you hit all of the bonus items and keep up with your multiplier (successive kills nets you additional money), you'll survive.
In addition to being a well-designed shooting game, Wild West Guns also has a phenomenal presentation. Gameloft did an excellent job adding little touches that enhance the experience, with characters that run towards you (if one hits you with a shovel, it pokes through the screen), rabbits that fall to the ground and then hop back to their starting positions and plenty of voices and western-style music. We're not fans of the bad guys that grab and force us to shake our expensive iPhones, but so long as we shoot first, they're not an issue.
Since the game asks you to press your targets, that means that your finger (however large) will obscure part of the screen, thus leaving you open to attack. That also makes scoring headshots more frustrating than it should be. We also noticed that during the 3-D train stages (you slaughter bandits trying to hijack a steaming locomotive) that the game chugs along, most likely because it cannot handle all of the action. Finally, where's the online leaderboard? Come on Gameloft. Give us a way to upload those scores.
Wild West Guns quickly became one of our favorite iPhone games. Once again, Gameloft delivers a slick-looking and fun video game that serves as both a showpiece for Apple's device and a great way to pass the time. Put on your spurs, reload your six-shooter and come out firing. Those sombreros won't shoot themselves.
