Link's Crossbow Training (with Zapper)

Right. One of the products is good. Unfortunately for those looking forward to it, it's not the Zapper. We snatched it out of the packaging like greedy children snatching up jelly babies and were quite happy with how it looked – the plastic is sturdy, it looks to have a good shape to it. However, when you come to actually use it the problems arise thick and fast. The remote slots in fine, but the nunchuk is a little less secure because of the fact that it only sticks in place via its screw holes and a small plastic lock at the bottom. The wire from the nunchuk is wrapped inside a compartment on the underside of the Zapper, which is quite well-designed but doesn't have any room for the wrist strap, leaving you with the strap waving around irritatingly as you play.

More importantly, though, how is it when you play the game with it? It has a nice weight to it when the necessary components are slotted in, but the way it is held makes the hands ache – the plastic from the nunchuk support section digs into the hand that is holding the trigger section. We had no problems with accuracy using it, but the thing is just too cumbersome to use properly, which means that your speed takes a hit in the process. It feels good to be using a 'gun' rather than just the standard controller, but overall it wasn't worth playing with the more 'immersive' device when it made things much more awkward. We chucked it out of the way after fifteen minutes and used the Wii remote and nunchuk alone and suddenly found ourselves much better at the game. Funny, that. Summary of the Zapper, in a word? Rubbish.

 

On to the second product in the package, the oddly-titled Link's Crossbow Training. There's not exactly any training in here – we'd be worried if a Wii game teaching people to shoot deadly projectiles appeared on shelves – as it's a nice, simple target shooting game at heart. The main game consists of nine levels, each of which has three timed stages that last a minute or so each. You earn points for shooting things (who didn't see that coming?) in each of the three stages and try to gain enough to be awarded medals (bronze to platinum). The scores you gain in each of the three stages per level are added together to make your final score for each level. New levels are unlocked when you score bronze medals or above until you have the full quota of nine. Alarm bells: feasibly, if you're naturally good at target shooting games and have a bit of luck, you could complete the single player mode within half an hour. We're not quite that good, but we polished it off within an hour – not with maximum scores, but it's still worrying how short the title is.

The three stages of the levels are divided into different categories. The first is the humble target shooting, wherein you're placed in a first person viewpoint and take out the targets. At pre-defined points the game will sound out a whistle and whisk you off to another location within the area and you will continue your penetrating of wooden circles with arrows. Some of the targets are a different colour and give you more points. Exciting stuff. As well as shooting at the targets you can also destroy quite a lot of the random things hanging around the environment for extra points – just don't shoot the Cucoos, or they'll minus points from your tally. Sometimes bonus gems pop up out of pots/barrels/etc. that you shoot to give you much-desired points. It's essential to be careful and string together successive hits without any misses to build up your multiplier and thus get decent scores if you want to progress. Disconcertingly, one of these stages asks you to shoot Gorons in the groin. Well, the targets they're holding there.

 

The second type of stage is the 'Defender' mode. This one's third person, but Link is stuck on the spot. You can turn around 360 degrees by moving the reticule to the edges of the screen, and you must take out enemies as they swarm you from all sides. Luckily you have a radar that lets you know where they're all coming from to help out. You've got to continue using multipliers to build up your scores so that they're satisfactory, and now there are power-ups bobbing about that allow you to use your crossbow like an automatic machine gun for 100 arrows. We're not quite sure of the logistics of that one (where are the arrows stored? Wouldn't the launching mechanism get jammed if used repeatedly in such rapid succession? Oh screw it...), but it is quite fun to mow down a bunch of Stalfos. It's even more fun if you're using the Zapper, but you'll probably have realised how uncomfortable it is by this point and decided that the fun factor of this one instance just isn't worth the hassle.

The final stage type is the deepest and probably the best. Ranger mode puts you in a third person view and allows you to move around using the analogue stick to tramp about the stage and deliver metal to the bodies of several enemies that are prowling the environment. Sort them all out within the time limit and you get a Triforce bonus and get to wander around shooting up the environment at your will until the time runs out. As before, multipliers play a large role and you can get the strange automatic crossbow power-up. We would have liked a complete story-mode with this type of stage.

 

That's about it, then. There's some lovely diversity between the modes and it all plays well, but it's really short. A multiplayer mode for up to four players is included to try and stave this off, but it's a case of one person playing a level, then passing the controller over and letting the other person play the level, so it's not very good. Other than that there's a practice mode that allows you to go through stages individually. It'll take a bit of work to get the best medals on each, but we can't imagine it's going to take more than a few hours in total.

What's there is fun, though. The Zelda licence works well with the title, which is especially surprising in the Ranger sections, and it's good fun to go through the locations of Twilight Princess decimating enemies with bolts of steel. You have to be a bit cynical though and ask why they felt the need to have the pack-in Zapper game be a member of the Zelda series – oh, of course, for the sales. Plus they could re-use all the Twilight Princess assets cheaply which, surprise surprise, they have. There's nothing wrong with Link's Crossbow Training aside the length, but seeing how it turned out makes us wish they'd put some more effort in, released something else with the Zapper and turned out Crossbow Training at a later date with a lot more in it. And a better title.