530 Eco Shooter

At the end of each of the game's three levels, there's a boss battle. Unfortunately it's the same boss battle three times - it just gets slightly harder. Cans and barrels come together to form a rubbish Megazord with flashing red weak-points and an arsenal of difficult-to-see sardine-can projectiles.

You have to collect a lot of energy from the preceding levels to be able to survive the boss fights, mostly because the camera starts veering around wildly without leaving you any time to harvest energy. It's hard, but mainly for the wrong reasons - you can't see what's being thrown at you until it's milliseconds away from hitting you in the face.

Despite the difficulty, it only took me about 45 minutes to get through 530 Eco Shooter's three levels. That's not a bad runtime for what's essentially a lightgun game, but it costs a 1000 Wii Points. Seven pounds for three levels? Really? That works out at 15.5p per minute of average entertainment.

Making it through every level only unlocks the opportunity to play them all in a row, which isn't something you'll be particularly grateful for, and the absence of online leaderboards or multiplayer gives 530 Eco Shooter zero replay value. Surely it wouldn't have been difficult to add an extra cursor to the screen. You're paying for an absolute maximum of maybe two hours of passable fun, assuming it takes more than two goes to get through the levels and you come back to replay them once or twice to beat the pre-set high scores.

If only 530 Eco Shooter were remotely nice to look at, it might be easier to forgive, but the levels look awful. Admittedly they're supposed to be industrial wastelands, but they could have been brighter. There could also be more interesting things to shoot at than twitching barrels. There aren't even any cut-scenes save a rubbish one at the very beginning.

There's none of the chaos, tension, explosions and visual feedback that usually give games in this genre their adrenaline kick. The music is dreadful mid-nineties midi guitar, too - it's not even comfortingly retro, it's just terrible. It's 2010, people, we have touch-screen phones and giant flat-screen televisions and dancing robots. We don't need midi music any more.

With one weapon, no multiplayer, no leaderboards and little replay value, 530 Eco Shooter doesn't exactly represent good value for money, and the drab presentation doesn't endear it either. The energy system is an interesting twist, forcing you to be economical with your bullets, but ultimately it's about an hour of confusing entertainment for £7.