Wow, what could be more fun that playing a first-person perspective shooting game similar to Lethal Enforcers and Virtua Cop while firing at real people in real places? To be honest with you, a lot of things can. QuickShot deluxe, a whopping 20 meg point-and-click shooting game hardly lived up to my expectations. To find out, keep on reading.
As the 200 minute download (yes, 200 minutes at 14,400 bps) came to an end I was eager to try out this game that I had developed such high expectations from reading the description on America Online. I went to load it - quicktime did not load. Quicktime is required. Curse me for starting up with extensions off. But quicktime meant movies so I restarted. A mildly jerky startup movie didn’t bother me, I sat tight and waited for the game to commence. First level: some back door alley. The enemies came out of hiding, but the animation was still jerky and jerky animation is terribly annoying. After a while I realized that there were only four guys in the game, and that they only came out in those four places. What a disappointment, maybe more would come in the following levels. Level 2 of the 5 level “crippleware” QuickShot Deluxe brought showed no signs of improvement. The enemies’ pictures weren’t even scaled to correct size. Level 3 emphasized this even more. Taking place in a train yard, some enemies were bigger than the train cars themselves while others were slightly larger than the wheel. And those same four enemies’ pictures hadn’t changed a bit. This was even more noticeable in the following indoor level. In side a living room these enemies’ would pop out, but with odd lighting effects casting different shadows. Now how can people indoors cast the same sort of shadow as out of doors? They can’t. The author just cut and pasted the same graphics into different backgrounds, sometimes scaling them down.
Horrible animation. A quicktime movie of a gun shooting a bullet at you signified game over. But wait, even that movie had problems. Not only was it jerky, but the pixels were huge and bit mapped, as if a 20” monitor was displaying 640x480 pixels. Then came the offer. For only $10 you could have access to the other 75 levels. While $10 isn’t very much, it’s far too much for a game of this quality. Not only do you spend up to $15 downloading it from a commercial service, but then you only get a 5 minute 5-level game.
 
Scaled 50%
Note - To conserve space, the above image was cropped down resulting in graphics that appear better than they actually are.
The graphics in QuickShot are 16-bit, but they’re not at all good. The background to levels look like the images were made for a Macintosh Color Classic monitor (9”) but then scaled up and cropped to a 640x480 resolution resulting in blocky graphics. While the enemy pictures aren’t bad, there still only 4 of them and they don’t change from level to level. Another graphic problem involves enemy fire. If an enemy gets off a shot, they’ll always hit you, no matter what. But that isn’t as big a problem as the actual bullet coming out of the gun. A brown colored triangle, which usually ends up being almost the same size of the gun, moves disgustingly slow. Sure it only takes .7 seconds for it to hit you, but you can actually follow this bullet as it flies through the air. Can you say, ‘unrealistic’?
The challenge is nonexistent in the 5-level demo. I beat it without getting shot once on my first try. That coupled with the lack of options make the game an even more unenjoyable experience. There are two guns in the game, a six shooter you have for levels 1-40, and a 15 shot automatic you have for levels 41-80. Too bad you don’t get to try out the automatic in the demo.
A huge disapointment. QuickShot Deluxe is a game plagued by many severe problems, most of which are mentioned above. The author needs to put a lot of work into it for it to compete with the fast-paced and smooth animation game “Blood Bath”. The author also needs to release a demo version with those 5-levels, rather than forcing someone to spend so much time downloading a game that really doesn’t fit the description whatsoever. Until this happens all I can say is that you should avoid QuickShot at all costs.
 
graphics sound effects music
   
challenge addictiveness fun factor
   
concept gameplay story line
   
overall
 
 
QuickShot Deluxe's System Requirements:
• 19 megabytes of hard drive space (ouch!)
• 8 megabytes of RAM
• monitor capable of displaying at least 256 colors at 640x480
