Chicken Shoot

Chicken Shoot is very much like Duck Hunt. Not a next-generation remake of Duck Hunt, but the original, depth and graphics considered. Okay, so we're exaggerating just a little, but the truth of the matter is that this DSI Games-published game isn't any prettier or deeper than the shooting gallery in Wii Play, which was about as basic as they come. You point the Wii remote at the screen and shoot down a very small selection of chickens as they fly across the screen. Occasionally, there will be cluckers on the ground, or hiding behind objects, and sometimes they'll even throw eggs your way. You might even pick up a different gun or two, but that's really as far as it goes. A few minutes in, you'll start to wonder if there's anything more to the game and if you've managed to stay with the process for an hour, you'll very likely have completed the whole, copy-and-pasted affair. Nothing here is going to ruffle your feathers, one way or the other.

Not quite up to Rapala Pro Fishing's graphic standards. The basic control mechanics are simplified to the point of boredom. You only point and shoot and except for a handful of different stages to do just that, there's not much to see. The title utilizes hand-drawn 2D graphics that, while not exactly ugly, are certainly dated, even for the less powerful Wii. The game features a very decent selection of locales to gun down ducks in, from the icy depths of Antarctica to the Nevada desert, where an extraterrestrial duck has crash landed. To give you an idea of just how shallow the game is and how often the same chickens and sound effects are re-used, the aforementioned alien chicken reappears in exactly the same spot after you have shot him dozens of times. Levels function as one big, tedious loop, respawning the same challenges over and over and over again until you start to wonder if there's even any point. We're still not sure that there is.