Point Blank Adventures is a free-to-play touchscreen version of the light gun classic that's out now for iPhone and iPad in New Zealand

If, like me, you spent a good chunk of the first twenty years of your life stumbling around seaside arcades, dropping coins into battered, cig-burnt machines, then you've probably got a soft spot for Point Blank.

Namco's shooting gallery lightgun game mixed together hard-nosed sniping and ridiculous cartoon graphics to great effect.

Some people might even tell you it was a better game than Time Crisis. Because it was.

Well, there's now a free-to-play mobile version called Point Blank Adventures.

But wait, before you run off to vomit up your breakfast, hear me out. Because it's not actually that bad.

The game hit the New Zealand App Store last night, but it hasn't landed anywhere else. So we did the maths and worked out it was probably a soft launch.

Using some technological wizardry we managed to get some hands-on time with the game, and while it doesn't capture the magnificence of the original, it has a pretty good go.

Instead of shooting things with a brightly coloured plastic gun, you're tapping on the screen. But the basic premise of the game remains the same.

Everything is split into bite-size arcade gaming chunks. Each of the little levels has its own victory conditions, but the basic idea is to shoot as many of the correct things as you can.

And it all works surprisingly well on a touchscreen. Things get frantic as the clock ticks down, and while the accuracy isn't perfect, it's good enough that you're rarely frustrated.

The free-to-play system employed here isn't too clingy either. There's a ticket system, but you only lose them when you fail a level, and in the half an hour I spent playing I didn't lose one.

That's not to say the game isn't challenging, and I wouldn't be surprised if the difficulty ramped up pretty severely in later sections.

Still, there's promise here, and just being able to whip out Point Blank and play it on a bus is a good thing.

We'll let you know when the Point Blank Adventures is available in the rest of the world, and whether Namco Bandai makes any changes to the version that it releases around the world.