The on-rail ’lightgun’ shooter is an arcade staple represented by classics ranging from Operation Thunderbolt to Time Crisis, and with the Wii’s main controller making a very obvious lightgun of its own (even with different underlying technology) it’s no surprise that the genre has seen plenty of attention on that system. Heavy Fire: Black Arms attempts to appeal to lightgun fans by offering a military-themed shooter set in modern times, yet what it gets right with the core controls is quickly undone by how poorly it handles everything else.
It starts off like a game of this type should, giving you just the bare minimum of plot (you’re part of a special forces unit sent to deal with illicit gun trading) before turning you loose near the enemy’s jungle base. Heavy Fire is very easy to play, with your Wiimote serving as your ’gun’ (playing with a gun-shaped controller shell or an actual gun-shaped Wiimote equivalent helps, but isn’t required) so you simply point and pull the trigger, then shake the controller every so often to reload. You start off with a lawyer-friendly version of a MP5 sub machine gun, and receive increasingly powerful weapons as you complete stages. Local co-op play is also supported, so in theory Heavy Fire has everything it needs to be successful.
The problem lies in the details. While some stages offer brief sniping or vehicle-mounted gun segments, most of the time you’re simply blasting away at waves of enemies while they obediently run into your line of fire. Players with sufficiently fast hands may even find the enemies barely fight back, as they spend so much time jogging around from cover to cover (or just sprinting right into the open for no good reason) and do very little shooting. You have to be very slow or intentionally idle for all but a handful of enemies in any given group to be much of a threat, with the rest of them either doing little of note or just firing their rifles randomly while taking forever to put you in any danger. This is easily Heavy Fire’s biggest problem, as the shoot-outs thus lack energy; enemies go through the motions, but it doesn’t feel like they care and you’re rarely given any challenge.
This lack of energy in gun-fights carries over to presentation, where there is far too much use of brown and dull gray. This is perhaps understandable since most of your fighting is being done in a coastal jungle area, but when combined with how dull and colorless the enemies look there simply isn’t much ’life’ to the affair. Not only are the enemies hard to see due to all this, but Heavy Fire also invokes all the worst ’Michael Bay film’ stereotypes with an over-use of shaky camera angles, explosions, and smoke, all of which serve to make it even harder to find some enemies. When you end up with shooting action against boring enemies that are difficult to see, this can bring on frustration very quickly; I found Heavy Fire wearing out its welcome within just a few stages.
Ultimately, Heavy Fire: Black Arms is an example of getting the basics right while botching everything else. Pointing and shooting are very easy to do, reloading works fine... yet there is no point in having these good controls when each stage is so visually dull and each wave of enemies utterly boring to fight. When you find yourself openly sighing and asking "Why am I playing this?", even the low 500 Point/$5 USD price tag is asking too much. For fans of the genre, I would urge you to look elsewhere; the Wii has plenty of lightgun games that range from decent to good, and this simply isn’t one of them.
