Duckshot

In a recent interview with a German newspaper, Brian Ferry managed to land himself in trouble by making the worst faux pas in the world: he said something nice about the Nazis. If you ignore the actual message, he said, you'll find that Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films about Hitler's government are really very impressive, and Goebbels was an admirable marketeer.

"Brian, no!", his agent mouthed from backstage. Nazis are bad.

While I hesitate to compare mankind's darkest hour with the practice of duck-hunting, I can't help but share the sentiment of Brian Ferry's hapless agent when playing Hand On's Duckshot. Every cell in my towering vegetarian temple of a body is opposed to the game on principle. Which is a shame, because it's actually quite good.

The aim, naturally, is to shoot ducks. Each level comprises a crisp single-screen view of a marsh, a glorious assortment of jerkily animated birds flying in both directions across the screen, and a shotgun barrel poised ominously at the bottom.

While you'd be forgiven for presuming that these elements can only combine to create a target shooting game, in the style of Gameloft's Big Range Hunting, Duckshot is far more novel than its humdrum title and the screenshots accompanying this review suggest.

Using the thumbstick or keypad to move your sights, the object is not to trace targets but simply to choose them. Aiming is automatic, and a nudge to the left or the right will jerk your gun onto whichever bird is closest. A yellow ring encircles the unfortunate target, and as soon as you pull the trigger the bird will die.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well Duckshot's trick is that shooting one bird at a time will get you nowhere, or thereabouts. Along the bottom of the screen is the word 'QUACK' in greyed-out letters. The only way to complete a level is to bring colour to these letters, and the only way to do that is to kill three ducks with a single shot by pointing your gun in the direction of a selectable cluster.

Further complicating matters is the fact that it's only possible to kill birds of the same breed simultaneously. Two pintails and a mallard won't cut it; you can select one or the other, but not both.

The swan, as befits a pet of Her Majesty the Queen, is invincible, and if one happens to be within your shot radius you won't be able to pull the trigger. Compensating for this inconvenience, however, is the Golden Snipe, whose death at your hands automatically triggers the death of every bird on the screen.

You only have 50 cartridges to accrue as many points as you can, but since shooting trios earns you more points and gets you farther than making kills one at a time, it behoves you to stay your itchy trigger finger and wait for ducks to come together in flight.

In practice, this entails a lot of waiting around, monitoring the birds' trajectories in order to predict future collisions and generally darting from target to target in the hope of an opportunistic bloodbath. At times, these opportunities come too infrequently, forcing you to pick off singles and pairs for fewer points and cruddier stamps.

Duckshot's major failing is its virtual randomness. Neither skill nor thought can really help you out if the game decides not to align the ducks, and you don't need much of either to advance if the ducks are feeling generous.

Nevertheless, despite its flaws Duckshot is an unusual game that merits a certain stunned applause for daring to combine mah-jong, arcade shooter Time Crisis, and Tetris, and dressing it up as blood sport that nobody with the good sense to play video games would have any interest in at all.