An important technical note: I want to stress this up front, the problem with the Crossfire Remote Pistol in this review isn’t exactly the product itself. The inherent limitations in how the Wiimote reads the cursor are the real issue, and where one lightgun (or gun shell, such as the Wii Zapper or similar products) works for one user, it may not work for another. This is due to variables like TV size, Wii sensor bar position, user height, where the user is standing in relation to the TV, etc., most of which the manufacturer cannot control. In other words, where one lightgun or gun shell may work perfectly for one user, it may be useless for another. To put it as simply as I can: "The Wii has many strengths. Lightgun style controls, oddly enough, aren’t one of them." Please keep that in mind for this review.

I feel sorry for Penguin United. In terms of features, construction, and layout, their offering would be a pretty good lightgun for the Wii. It has a nice trigger, the grip feels great in your hand, and most of the important buttons are in easy to reach places. It even has a speaker and an expansion port for plugging a Nunchuk in, so it is essentially a Wiimote in the shape of a gun rather than being a shell you stick a Wiimote in to. I feel sorry for the manufacturer because technical limitations mean there is no way they can guarantee this product will work for you; they’re trying to sell an inherently flawed idea.

As this is basically a Wiimote in the shape of a gun, that means it could be used with almost every game on the system. The controls are certainly laid out to let you do so; the trigger acts as B, your thumb on the pistol grip can press A with ease (there is even an A button on each side, enabling left-handed use), and the left side of the gun has the Power, Home, +, and - buttons while the area just above the grip has a d-pad plus 1 and 2 buttons. It’s a genuinely good layout and feels fantastic, but there is just one problem: where you’re pointing this lightgun and where the in-game cursor registers at can be two wildly different things. The problems are pretty easy to see as it means you may have trouble even navigating the Wii Menu, nevermind actually shooting at things in a game.

Some games do offer various ’calibration’ options that may help with this problem, but not all games do and the options may not be enough. I found that even with significant tinkering, aiming the gun’s sights at the center of the screen caused the cursor in Link’s Crossbow Training to register as being in the bottom right corner; I had similar issues in other games, to varying degrees. This forced me to aim the gun well off-screen to get the cursor to appear over my targets, and the exact point the cursor was aiming at would wave around wildly. My scores fell very sharply compared to using a lightgun shell or just holding the Wiimote in hand, both of which worked fine for me. Yet a look at online reviews for many lightgun shells shows some users have the exact same problems with those shells that I did with this gun, so your results can and likely will wildly vary from mine.

So when I issue a 5.0 review for the Crossfire Remote Pistol, understand that it has nothing to do with the product’s construction. It feels great, the button layout is very smart, and it is by all rights a good lightgun design. The problem is that it’s a Wii lightgun, a concept that is technologically flawed to start with and Penguin United honestly should have applied their smart design to other types of product. This isn’t to say the Crossfire has no merit, far from it. The Crossfire might work for you, and if it does you have a wonderful controller for playing games like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles or Link’s Crossbow Training. But if it doesn’t work properly, and there’s a very real chance it won’t due to so many variables, then you have just wasted about fifty dollars on something you can’t return because it’s not truly broken. So for all its good points, I can’t recommend the Crossfire unless you have a chance to inexpensively test it in your Wii’s normal play environment; you’re otherwise taking a $45-$50 gamble.