On Point

Written by Joseph Moorer on 8/8/2024 for PC  

How many times will you hear me express my undying love for light gun games? On this website, probably not a lot. I love them. LOVE THEM! So much so that I just recently bought a 27 inch CRT TV to play the old school ones, like Duck Hunt, and Virtua Cop. So much so, that every time I see an ad for these new fangled, albeit expensive light guns, I get the thing in my cart, but cannot pull the trigger. (see what I did there?) So much so, that while I was done playing my pristine copy of Playstation 1's Time Crisis, I immediately put it back in the box for fear that I would break it.

I also have the Guncon Point Blank bundle, and with the same condition. None may touch it. I almost just said screw it, and bought one of the overseas cheap ones this last time, more to show my daughter how cool light gun games really are, but then it happened. There are heroes among us, and Actuator released their own love letter to the shooting gallery goodness. On Point saved me from making another shotgun purchase. How long will I hold out is the question. 

 

For those of you who have zero idea what I'm talking about, you cannot get light gun games in the present day. There are none. Sure there are point and shoot games for the Switch, and the Wii and the Playstation Move had some things, but it just didn't feel the same. And all those classic games you may have do not work on your current flat screen LED/OLED TV's or monitors, so if you don't have a tube TV, or a CRT TV, you are out of luck. They just don't work. At all. Under any circumstances. I won't get into why here, but let's just say that as advanced as that light gun tech was once upon a time, it's not anymore. Actuator must've knew what I wanted, because they've released this game for Steam VR, and Meta Quest, and let me tell you. The itch is scratched. It's a shooting gallery game. And you have to shoot a certain amount of things to continue shooting things. It may seem like I'm dumbing it down, but that's essentially what it is. 

You pick your mode (training, amateur, expert), and the game shows you all the shooting galleries available. It randomly picks 4 at a time, and then you can choose which of those 4 you want to take on. There are plenty of different things to do. Shoot at a sheep until you sheer it all the way. Protect a friend by shooting incoming lava rocks. Keep a can up in the air for a certain number of seconds. And all of these come with different goals to pass. Shoot 40 bottles with unlimited bullets. Shoot one falling leaf, with one bullet. Hit this many targets in this amount of time. If you complete the task,  you move on to the next. Except, as they tell you how much time you have, there's no timer on the screen, which seems very odd. I'm not sure if I enjoyed that more or not. 

There are three levels. Training, which is NOT a tutorial, is just four levels, easy stakes, and probably where you should start if you're not familiar with the game it's based on. Amateur gives you a harder challenge, and ups it to 8 levels. Expert, which is extremely hard, takes your goal to 12 levels. These challenges have huge stakes, with less time, and more pressure. For instance, in Training, you probably have to shoot 20 bottles, but in expert, you shoot 80 bottles in the same amount of time. You may have 12 bullets in a target game, but you only have 6 in expert. You get the idea. I was very close to beating the expert levels, but again, they choose them at random, so just when you think you've perfected a challenge, one you've never seen before is thrown at you. This is where the replay value starts and stalls.

Your score is calculated by different factors. How many things you hit, the accuracy of how you shot, and how much time you took to complete the task. The accuracy of the gun is really good. You know what you're shooting at, and can even aim down the sight if you so choose. I thought you can shoot things in the arcade opening, and even between levels, but that is not the case. Hits are self explanatory. Accuracy is calculated via percentage, and if you get 95.7 percent, you get 957 points. The math didn't math on the other scores, so there's really no way of telling. You get a score regardless if you pass or fail (failing and expert mode go together like a gun in a holster). You can fail a course a couple of different ways. You will lose a heart for not meeting the requirements of the game, and once you lose all three hearts, it's game over. However, some games have you shoot at targets, and tell you NOT to shoot something. If you do, you lose a heart for every one you hit. For instance, if you meet a requirement, but happen to shoot three bombs, your game is over. It's back to the arcade, and say bye bye to the leader board. 

The game boots right up and throws you into the action too, so again, there's no tutorials to go through. If you beat all the games set before you, you get to put your initials in, and take your place in both local and global leaderboards. In the pre-release version I played, my name kept coming up unknown, but I know I'm second place as of right now, and no one can take that from me. Once you put your initials in, you can check the leader board whenever you wish. That's the only online element though, and this is where it gets a little disappointing for me. This is a local game. A couch VR game. And I know it can be done. I just played Under Cover, and that was fantastic.

In the options, you can change the sound settings, go from right to left hand, and for some reason, make the graphics more pixelated and worse, in my opinion. You can turn down the rumble feature, if you so choose. I believe there are other games to unlock as you progress through the game, or these may come at a later date as the game is in early access. We might get something later down the line, but for now, the replay value stands at that. 

Overall, I'm happy with the game. It does scratch an itch, but I feel like it's also just scratching the surface. The replay value is just perfecting the games, and getting good, but that's about it. An online leaderboard is cool, but it's not enough for me to keep coming back. It's a couple games and done for me, and that's tough for a person who really doesn't do VR as much as he could. Maybe I'll check on the game's progress in the months to come, but right now, On Point loses it's sharpness very quickly.