There is no shortage of reviews that show just what a terrible game can be bought in “Chicken Shoot”, but I somehow let my desire to get a good deal overcome me when I made my purchase, even though I had read the reviews, and I really did know better. It’s not so much that you should expect something spectacular for $14.99, but the real problem is that stores simply shouldn’t be carrying garbage of this sheer incomparability.
I had read that it was a barely OK first person shooter. The fair warnings said the music is repetitive, the targets are uninteresting, and that the whole experience quickly grows tiresome. All of that is true, and boy howdy at that, but that just doesn’t do any justice to the full injustices of this terrible, embarrassing mockery of what could have actually been a mediocre game.
Make no mistake about it: this title does not even remotely reach the elevated echelon of “mediocre”.
If you’re a Gen-Xer, you surely remember that weak, barely playable game “Duck Hunt”. This game is kind of like that, but this time it’s chickens, and it’s about half as playable as that game was. It seems fifteen years of technologic progress has done nothing to make this game any good at all.
The controls are weak at best. You have to scroll around a screen that’s far bigger than your TV, and you can’t quickly move from one side of the playable area to the other, and the same is true for top to bottom scrolling. You can’t make quick motions off-screen to scroll, or it stops trying to keep up with you. This makes your ability to follow targets, or seek out additional targets, just about nill.
The 2-player mode makes it even worse. Your already needlessly shrunken screen is now cut in half, and although you’re both still playing the same stage with the same targets, neither of you can see much more than a horsey-blindered, tunnel-visioned joke of a screen. This renders the game virtually unplayable in 2-player mode, though I must insist again that single player mode isn’t much better.
Reviews I’d read said the music may drive you just about insane, and this is indeed the case. You can shut it off from the main menu (which is just about the only element you can customize), so you’ll want to do that sometime in the middle of your second game.
What irritated me most is that the only things you can shoot are the targets. You can’t blast through trees, deface foliage or even leave bullet marks. Again, these are technological advancements in gaming we moved past easily fifteen years ago. Worse still, there are many moving targets on the screen that you can’t shoot, and that only waste your bullets, time and already waning patience for this terrible, terrible game.
What frankly frustrates me the most is that, even this title cost only $5, it would still be a terrible value. If I had hacked my Wii to download games for free, I’d still feel ripped off for the bandwidth and time it took to download it, and the cost of the DVD I’d have had to burn it onto. And yet, stores are still selling it.
Discount stores like Target, Best Buy and Wal-Mart need to immediately discontinue this title. They won’t lose money if they keep it, because uninformed soccer mom’s trying to do good for their kids will keep buying it for every approaching birthday, but that just means that they’re being ripped off to buy their kids a game that will barely beg a handful of hours of play.
Our lead tester, the 9-year-old autistic boy named Patrick, played about an hour before going back to Lego Star Wars, The Complete Saga. He has now played that game, which was also purchased for under $20, easily 100 hours now. He’s played every single level at least one, and some as many as ten to fifteen times. That is value.
This, on the other hand, is licensed garbage on its best day. It’s so irresponsible that a merchant would stock it, it’s beyond belief, and it convinces me (along with the extremely restrictive return policies) that I can simply never, never, never buy a title from my favorite stores without first fully researching its quality and merit on my own.
This is, of course, just my opinion. You don’t have to take it from me, you can see for yourself by reading reviews at PLACE 1, PLACE2 or PLACE3, or by watching the following video reviews on YouTube.
NeverChris Review of Chicken Shoot from YouTube.
Game play samples from Ihopbryo (low quality) on YouTube.