What do you get when you from this equation, Point Blank - humour + soft dart guns + pre-teen marketing? Thats right Nerf N-Strike on Nintendo Wii and there really is nothing that can sum up this game better than that little equation.



Take from that what you will, the fact that the game comes pre-packaged with a fully functioning Nerf gun that can be transformed into a Wii Lightgun will sell it to many, and its hard to knock the marketing genius behind such a move. However, bundled in stuff does not a great game make, and in this respect thats certainly the case as Nerf N-Strike is pretty damn average in every respect.

The game plays you a little story about a kid being recruited into some sort of secret agent society that uses Nerf rifles as their weapons (sounds rather PC doesn't it? James Bond for modern Britain if you will), and forces you to partake in a bunch of rather pointless tasks in order to advance up the ranks to be the number 1 agent. These tasks range from shooting at certain colour robots to knocking blocks off a circular platform with your darts via a sort of shooting based pinball game. There's a wide variety of little challenges to do, so the game feels fairly varied throughout. However, the game never really feels too challenging, with the tasks being fairly easy and the only way difficult comes into it is slightly stricter time limits as you go on and a seemingly inaccurate aiming system.

You see sometimes, you'll use the on-screen aiming reticule and be hitting what you think are perfect shots, only to watch in annoyance as your dart/ball goes wide of the mark, even when the target is stationary, it becomes a real annoyance and it feels really rather random as to how succesful your shots are. But thats fine, the guns cool right? Well, yeah, sort of. Definetly so if your in the games ideal group of being a pre-teen, but those of you who want something thats more gun like than the Wii Zapper will probably be better off with SEGA's Hand Cannon that was released for House of the Dead Overkill because the grip on this thing is just that little bit too small for adult hands, leading to a bit of cramp not helped by the guns top heavy feel when the Wii Remote is installed.

But, if your kids been eyeing up HotD but you're not really happy about them playing it, theres absolutely no reason why they shouldn't really enjoy this, aslong as they're able to look past the fact their shooting robots and boxes rather than zombies who want to chew on your brains. It's fairly enjoyable, even if it does nothing too exciting or new, and that random accuracy bug only seems to crop up from time to time and would probably only go noticed by the most eagle eyed player, plus you get a Nerf gun thrown for good measure which gives the whole package a more valuable feel.