This is a shooting gallery game where you use your Switch Joycon to aim and fire at goodies and ghosts to earn coins to keep playing or cash in for virtual prizes.  Three can play at the same time, and the game has a Japanese summer festival theme.  Just watch out for those pesky Yokai ghosts!

You can play this game in one or two ways.  In TV mode, you can use the JoyCons to aim at the TV and fire bullets.  In handheld mode, you can move a cursor around to aim with the L stick.  Even though physically aiming works better, both ways are fine.  The two main modes are Carnival Mode and Party Mode.

In Carnival Mode, you pick one of three arcade games to play, but they’re all the same.  It makes me wonder if this was originally an arcade game.  I tried to look up information on that, but I couldn’t find anything.  Anyway, in Carnival Mode you shoot at prizes on tables.  When you knock them down, you get coins.  The goodies can be things that are simple to knock down, like boxes of snacks, or harder things like statues or trophies.  Each time you knock something down, you get coins.  These coins let you fire bullets, so the game can be neverending if you are good enough.  You can switch between three bullet types.  Corks are the cheapest and weakest, iron balls are stronger but cost a little more, and bottle rockets cost the most but can zero in on targets.  The only way this mode ends is if you run about of bullets.  But even then you have to physically stop the game.  So when that happens or if you want to stop in the middle of shooting, you can.  Sometimes in Carnival Mode, you might shoot a goodie that is possessed by a ghost.  When that happens, shoot the ghost that comes out.  When you shoot enough ghosts, you can enter a haunted house where you must shoot at lots of ghosts for tons of bonus coins.

The other main mode is Party Mode.  Here you can play mini-games based on what you do in Carnival Mode.  There are over a dozen of these games, and they are usually timed and require you to reach a certain score to pass.  Even though this mode feels more like a game, oddly enough you don’t earn coins in this mode.  I wish you did.

You can earn coins by playing Carnival Mode, doing a lottery that happens every so often, or completing missions. So what do these coins do outside the modes?  Well you can use them in Auntie’s Shop to buy more mini-games, figures and goodies to collect, and even all the ghosts you encounter.  When you buy all the mini-games, you can even unlock a mode where you play a bunch of them in a row.  You can also view the things you’ve unlocked in your Figure Collection.

I wish there was a little more to this game, but otherwise I kind of liked it.  The Japanese festival theme was neat, as it reminds me of Taiko Drum Master/Taiko no Tatsujin.  And I just like arcade style shooting gallery games like Point Blank.  If you do, too, you may want to check this one out.

Kid Factor:

Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  You use carnival rifles to shoot at trinkets to knock them off shelves, and fire at cartoony ghosts, but that’s it.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.

Tags: Game Reviews