The Shoot reviewed on PlayStation 3 by James Hamer-Morton. Game supplied for review by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

The Shoot casts you as an action movie star, whose job it is to perform extremely well in a series of five movie shoots that all task you will firing at a selection of themed enemies while avoiding shooting your friends. Now this is the movie business, so they won't be real cowboys, mobsters, sea creatures, robots or ghostly apparitions, but wooden cut-out facsimiles

Each of the five movies have four stages that last 3-4 minutes each. That's just over an hour to play through all stages, but naturally that's not all that's on offer. Unfortunately it's not so much the gameplay itself that I find irritating (any more than it should be to aim for a high score) but it's the structure of the game that has some serious irrationality. Thinking I'd be generous and start the game (which allows two players to shoot at once) with my girlfriend as my action sidekick, we started the game, kicking us straight into a tutorial before we could play anything else, at least after the quick and easy calibration.

This tutorial is necessary to explain the power ups that can be earned by hitting a number of targets in a row without missing, raising your combo multiplier up. Indeed your score is multiplied by how many things you have hit in a row without missing. Shooting something that is not a target halves your combo, so accuracy is extremely important in gaining a high score in The Shoot. Special powers include 'Showtime' which puts the game in slow motion for a few seconds, allowing you to take longer and hit faster moving targets, activated by literally spinning around on the spot. Seriously. You can get away with a lasso movement around your head activating it, should you want to stay seated, but it's a very strange way of disorienting you and your aim just before giving you an opportunity to take your time. Unfortunately, occassionally the spinning motion doesn't active 'Showtime' and instead counts as a physical attack. Should an enemy get too close, you can choose to hit it, by swinging your Move controller out towards it.

Then there's shooting down into the ground offscreen, which activates a smart bomb power, killing everything on screen, and shooting up into the air activates rampage for a short time, giving you a machine gun and no penalty for missing targets. Sure it adds a little variety, well needed because of the shallowness of standard light gun games anyway. Almost as a little nod to Time Crisis, you can literally move your controller around to try to dodge incoming grenades, bullets and the like, though sometimes you'll be moving the wrong way, and accidentally move into the attack.

So we're through the tutorial, it all makes sense, and we're ready to play the first movie, 'Outlawed', a western, together. Except we can't. You have to play through the career mode, to unlock the ability to play it in multiplayer. And to do this, you'll need to hit a specific high score. To unlock another movie, beat another score and so on. It feels a lot more restrictive to be unable to play multi player until you've performed well enough.

It's easy to see why that happens though. Since the main game is so reliant on combos for hitting a high score, the system can't stand up to the same challenges in multi player. Since you'll be both going for the same target, if you both fire at once, someone will lose their combo, and in an even game, this means you'll likely never break a 5x combo or reach a high enough score to get a high star rating for the scene. Players that shoot the first target best gain control of the scene and choose when to activate the specials, and handle the dodging, still useful, since you lose your combo by being hit.

The real way to rack up high scores is by having a high multiplier and activating a showstopper; basically special events in each scene that give you a lot of points for doing specific things. It might be shooting a specific object, or hitting every enemy of a certain type in a section, but while you'll need to experiment to find them, they can make a massive difference to your end score. There are also 'deleted scenes', highlighted objects that when shot give you a bonus short sequence to play for extra score, and hidden 'poster pieces' which when found unlock a separate themed challenge for each movie. However you need to play the game in single player career mode for these posters to appear, so any sense of progression or working towards unlocking more stuff is completely lost in the multi player which is a huge shame.

Lots of little niggles litter the game and frustrated me hugely. The dodging system ends up being very frustrating when sitting down, requiring physical movement to avoid things. You'll never know in advance but sometimes you have to move side to side and sometimes just directly down. There are even quick draw style sections where you have to point the Move controller to the ground and fire as quickly as possible after you have pointed it back to the screen. Sometimes the controller loses calibration when it's off the screen, entirely ruining your aim, and while a quick button press solves the issue, it's already too late in a game where perfection is so important. To compound the problem, if you shoot too fast at a bunch of enemies, shards of wood from the first enemy you destroy can get in the way of your next target, and, you guessed it, shooting them ruins your combo, even if your proper target is behind. There is also no indication as to what you should be shooting. TNT barrels in the first movie are fair game apparently, and won't ruin your combo. Treasure chests that look like they may open and give you rewards aren't in fact targets... unless you're playing the underwater movie, where they are a requirement for a showstopper event. A game about accuracy and perfect shooting combos should telegraph a lot more clearly what should and what shouldn't be shot.

Quite often the game makes me miserable, with the ridiculous accuracy required in later movies hitting a tiny part of a moving target, and setting enormous score targets making me feel like I will never be good enough to hit the scores required for a 5 star, and this is one game I am confident I will never put the stupid hours in to get even close to being lucky enough to get all of the trophies.

While there's plenty of potential, and certainly some fun in the game, The Shoot remains a disappointment and a let down considering how good it could have been. Even the speech irritates me with a massive amount of inappropriate repetition; if I hear “This is the dawning of awesome” one more time I may get more use out of the strap on the PlayStation Move. Overall, if you're desperate to hone your skills on a very taxing light gun game, then give it a shot, but if not, I'd definitely recommend Time Crisis: Razing Storm over this.