It’s a good thing the iPhone’s capacitive glass screen is not supposed to wear out, because this is just the game to achieve this. Shooting Gallery sees you tapping furiously at fast moving fairground targets – your finger replaces the traditional rifle with the wonky aiming sights – you’re able to tap on several targets per second, so you can quickly rack up a decent score.
The game’s made more interesting by a variety of bonuses (2x, 4x) and extra features (extra bullets, a bomb, machine gun) that appear as falling icons and also have to be accurately tapped. It’s all a plot
to help you develop Repetitive Strain Injury in your main digits, I tell you….
The bonuses work well and you can even win a variety of cuddly toys and other typical fairground prizes. Well, virtual prizes, anyway. You can at least submit your best scores in ‘Easy’, ‘Normal’, ‘Hard’ or ‘Time Trial’ modes to a worldwide high score table. This is displayed after a few seconds, on request, by retrieving the data from the developer’s web site. Thought your 85,000 was good? See the folks who have put in the hours needed to get to 4.5 million!
The actual scoring system is complex in that you lose points for targets which don’t get hit at all and you get more points the closer you get to each target’s centre. Luckily you don’t have to remember what’s what or even keep glancing at the score – just tap away as fast and as accurately as you can and you’ll do OK.
Shooting Gallery has novelty value for an adult but is of best long term interest to a child. Perhaps this, more than any other is the one to leave installed on your iPhone ready for long car or train journeys, it’s a super ‘keep them quiet’ distraction for bored
offspring!