Shooting down a good game

Target from thinktank games is yet another of their clever `179 price point collection. They’ve certainly got their pricing right, but on so many other levels, Target is all wrong. It’s politically incorrect. It glorifies guns. It’s a silly and irrelevant veneer on what is a perfectly respectable game that surely did not need this angle to sell.

Working your way carefully through a 5x5 grid with the target painted in cross hairs and dead centre, you need to line up the other 24 tiles, each with a gun visual, at the target. You’re challenged to get all your guns trained on him within 15 minutes. Into my second attempt, I worked from target outwards, and made steady progress, till I suddenly realised I had three guns out of place, and no way of knowing how many pieces I’d have to set right to correct the situation.

There is a method to approaching a maze, or a jigsaw. Nail the corner pieces. Get the outer edges done. There’s always a technique that gets you there faster. Several attempts later, it continued to elude me. Exasperated, I found time to study the visuals. The assault weapon I thought they’d finally ban from over the counter sale after the recent pre-school killings. A Johnny Depp pirate-worthy long barreled thickset pistol and a Daniel Craig sort-of-side arm. These three graphics repeat on the 24 double side tiles. This careful check of my armoury did not get me any closer to victory!