Wicked Monster Blast! is an arcade style shooting gallery game for the Nintendo Wii. It comes packaged with two colorful gun peripherals to attach the Wii remote to, but the game works just fine without them. Which is good considering the game supports four players. With its quirky characters and silly mini-games, this title is very similar to Namco’s classic arcade light gun game series: Point Blank. But is it as good? Read on to find out.

The game has three modes. In Arcade Mode, you pick a crazy character and follow his or her story, though really all you do is try and survive a string of shooting mini-games to see how far you can get, and how high of a score you can obtain. You get three chances, and if you fail one of the rounds, you lose one of those chances. Once your tries are all up, it’s Game Over. You must reach a certain score to pass a game, only problem is they don’t tell you what that score is until you are done.

In Family Mode, you can select from any of the mini-games you’ve unlocked to play separately. The only problem with this mode is the menu interface. In order to pick a game, you have to shoot a balloon with a picture of the game on it. I can understand why they would want to be creative in all aspects of the game, but a simple menu interface where you can see clearly the games you can play would’ve been more sufficient. Sometimes less is more.

The final mode is Survival, where you must try and go through as many rounds in the random games as you can. Sounds a lot like Arcade Mode, except it’s for one player only. In all the modes, you can use power-ups by pressing the A button to help boost your score or hinder other players. In the Options screen you can view the gallery, credits, and high scores, although it’s really hard to attain a spot on the list.

Of course the real stars are the mini-games. You’ll shoot rocks to make sculptures, defend from missile attacks, solve simple equations, match pictures, keep hippos from eating all the food, serve dinner to a whale, break bottles, and more. Only problem is there are only about a dozen mini-games. While they may vary each time you play and there are multiple difficulty levels, it’s still not enough, especially considering each title in the Point Blank series sports over 50 shooting challenges.

So even though it’s not as good as Point Blank, Wicked Monster Blast! might provide some families with a few hours of shooting fun anyway.

Kid Factor:

Wicked Monster Blast! is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Cartoon Violence. Even though you shoot lots of targets in the game, the violence is only the Looney Tunes kind. Kids will love the crazy characters and mini-games, but might get bored at the lack of variety and frustrated at the difficulty, even on the easy settings. Reading skill isn’t required, because while the game has written instructions, they don’t do a good job of telling you how to play the games, so you just have to figure them out on your own. Which is usually pretty easy to do.

Tags: Game Reviews