Johnny HotShot

Inevitably, Johnny has been sucked into his favourite Wild West-themed arcade shooter and placed in the role of sheriff.

Can he capture all the nasty bandits and end the reign of Mr. Wang? Will his favorite game be just as entertaining in real life? Could this latest 3DS eShop release be a must-have for the handheld?

Respectively: who cares, not really, and definitely not. Johnny HotShot might be Johnny's favourite game, but it sure as hell isn't ours.

Not so hot

For each bandit on the loose you have to go through a series of three trials, each slightly different to the last, but all revolving around the Wild West theme.

A shooting gallery sees you tapping the touchscreen to take out cardboard bandits, making sure not to shoot the innocent ladies. Then it switches to a saloon shootout, where you move left and right and fire straight to hit the baddies.

Finally, once you've coaxed the main bandit out, it's all about chasing him down on your horse, shooting him lots of times, then lassoing him and dragging him back to a jail cell.

None of this is particularly entertaining - it's all pretty much bog-standard old skool action ripped straight from the '80s, with sort-of current gen visuals slapped on.

And there's nothing more to it. The game supplies these three mini-games (which last around 20 seconds each), and asks you to do them five times over. Bulging with content this ain't.

Wild Worst

Johnny HotShot gets off to a bad start, and it doesn't get any better.

The points system seems to be disconnected from how well you do, as it's all about speed rather than the score you accumulate, and the combo system also means absolutely nothing, as the game wants you to kill one specific target at a certain point rather than rack up multiple kills on the trot.

Stars are awarded depending on how quick you were, but the game is so stingy with the stars that you'll have to be seriously quick to even reach the third round.

It's not that the game is particularly hard - just that it's not completely obvious what the goal is.

You can be getting perfect scores all over the place during the shooting gallery, for example, yet still end up looking at a Game Over screen. Afterwards you learn that the game wanted you to shoot one guy who spun around really quickly at a certain moment - not get perfect shots at everybody. Of course!

Johnny HotShot is light on content, utterly confusing, and dull. A string of achievements that have had no thought put into them whatsoever is just the icing on the cake. Avoid with a capital A, V, O, I, and D.