The 3DS and DS aren’t systems created with shooters in mind, but that won’t stop me! Especially since I’m stuck without any other gaming system at the moment, so I’ll deal with what I have.

All of these games have touchscreen aiming. I personally just use my thumb, holding the 3DS like a controller. This way I find controlling these games pretty serviceable, not too different than using a second thumbstick. I just wish all of them had the option increase the sensitivity beyond the maximum setting.

==========

Moon (DS version)

This game has one main shtick - using a small remote-controlled robot to solve puzzles. Which means crawling through a low space and opening the door. It is kinda cool maybe once, not so fun a hundred times. Especially if you need to do it again when backtracking, which is close to 50% of the game. Yep, get to the objective, then all the way back. Over and over. At the beginning there are some shortcuts, but those eventually disappear.

However, at one point you get to go out to the surface of the Moon and even use a moon car… This was pretty great. Two missions, a few minutes each. So why is the rest of the game just crawling through the same repetitive halls and vents?

The weapons are functional albeit standard, and the AI is about right, so combat and controls feel decent enough if rather bland.

Terrible music, I had to turn it off. But the atmosphere is pretty decent without it… The game does sell the loneliness of the setting well enough. These devs also made Dementium, which I’ve not played yet, but I sense that they were going for the somewhat spooky feeling too.

The story is classic B-Movie shlock. Alien artifact, government conspiracy, logs from scientists, you know the drill.

Overall, while I appreciate these guys were trying to make something slightly different, I’d give it a pass. Maybe I’ll check the 3DS remake a shot if it’s available, but if it’s the same kind of game, I’ll bounce very quickly.

Rating: 3-4/10

==========

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (DS)

If anything, I was expecting something worse than Moon. Surprisingly, this is… Pretty good?

There is one major flaw: to use iron sights, you double tap the screen - which is much easier to do by accident than to get it on purpose. It’s not completely game-breaking, at least on easy difficulty, so I managed to live with it. Eventually.

Other than that, it feels like a COD game through and through, just simplified. There are some annoyances, like a few sections where you get offed by a sniper, which really goes with the COD territory rather than this being a bad game, if that makes sense.

The game knows what it is, and works with the limitations of aiming with the touch screen, so the combat is more like a whack-a-mole shooting range. Again, just standard COD stuff, but I think on DS it would work better as a light gun style game. The turret sections are really the most fun anyway. Some bomb-diffusing minigames are thrown in too.

It sorta follows the story beats of the main COD4, sadly without the interesting parts. No Chernobyl here.

Music is mostly absent, only kicking in during some events, making the game eerily silent most of the time.

Lots of bugs like falling through floors and sound cutting out, but for those few hours it’s tolerable.

The sequel has the option to trigger iron sights with a button, and honestly I’m quite looking forward to that improved game. It also helps that this one is the shortest of this review batch, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Overall, a decently worthwhile endeavour.

Rating: 5-6/10 (knocked off two for the stupid aiming system, and bugs)

==========

C.O.R.E (DS)

This game REALLY wants to be a 1997 PC game. The intro cinematic is competent, the level design is surprisingly solid (if somewhat confusing and with no map), the industrial music slaps, there’s lots of blood and no reloading, heck you can even jump?! There are secrets (at first)!? And is that damage grunt from Quake? First impressions: This gonna be good.

Also coming with that retro territory are manual save points and health/armor stations. That’s less welcome on a limited system like the DS in my opinion, but could still work.

So what went wrong? EVERYTHING. The shooting, the combat! The stuff you play a shooter for! Most enemies are hitscan, pack a damn punch and are placed such that they start shredding through your armor as soon as you open some doors. Sometimes from behind, or from the sides. Not a good combination with slow, imprecise aiming, and non-regenerative health.

Additionally they are often difficult to see (everything is grey on grey) and very difficult to hit, so even the lowliest spider is a formidable and annoying opponent.

The weapons aren’t exactly impressive either, despite all being swiped from the Quake and Unreal series. You can rocket jump however, so there’s that at least.

Even on easy difficulty, I’d run out of ammo or die of lead poisoning pretty often. This design is simply unsuitable for the controls DS offers.

The story? It’s an underground military base with alien science experiment going wrong theme, what can you expect. Pretty much the same as Moon.

Such a disjointed game. Something special could have been here, but I suppose half the team was smoking crack.

Rating: 2/10 for gameplay and generic setting 9/10 for the 90’s-era shooter style if you’re into that, and music

==========

Ironfall: Invasion (3DS)

I had to keep rewriting this review as I was playing the game, my opinion of it kept shifting that much. It began at “painfully generic Gears of War clone with very decent visuals for the 3DS” through “damn good looking game feeling like mostly made from store-bought assets” to “really impressive indie project that actually has some personality of its own”.

If C.O.R.E. is ripping off games of the late 90’s, Ironfall is ripping off games from the early to mid-00’s. Movement and mechanics straight from Gears of War, weapons from Unreal II I guess, the whole feel reminds me of games like Pariah or Resistance.

Together with ridiculously generic basic enemies (a metallic, humanoid robot like from a 70’s B-movie), and other things ripped wholesale from elsewhere, I feel like it could’ve worked better to add some humour and sell it as a parody. It still is in my head.

But it keeps getting better as time goes on. It certainly has a lot more variety than Moon or C.O.R.E. - just like in COD4, you travel around the world - and overall it has some weird charm to it. Even some cool bits thrown in, like one cool boss or playing as a different operative. And some minigames too, can’t be without those…

The story is another alien invasion/rescue nonsense - is this the only way to make a shooter with a new IP on the DS or 3DS? But it is just enough to not be too offensive. Music is the typical action game/music bank kind of stuff - but there’s a lot of it, so it helps.

At the end, I guess it wasn’t such a bad idea to put together a game from other people’s ideas, backed by great tech. I’ve played worse shooters on better systems. I’d probably even rather play this than the first Gears… Which isn’t saying that much, but still. (I’m just not a fan of GoW.)

In addition to touchscreen aiming, you can use the C-Stick too, but it just doesn’t work for me with such a fast-paced shooter.

So yea… Good enough for what it is. Quite a blandburger, but still deserving to be a 3DS cult classic, if for nothing else than because there are so few games like it on this system. It could hardly be any better under the circumstances of a three-person dev team; I just wish someone else could have used this engine to do something really new.

Rating: 7/10 (because there are so few games on the 3DS like it, otherwise it’s a very average 5/10)