The first-person shooter in the 90s was still a new thing for gaming. Called “Doom clones” for several years before the current nomenclature took hold, these kind of games were often seen as violent and filled with gore, primarily made for adults, with very few kid-friendly versions of the genre readily available. Then again, it was mostly cartoon violence, but you try telling old decrepit senators like Joseph Lieberman that.
But then in 1997, Sunstorm Interactive, a developer of expansions for games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior, and publisher WizardWorks released Deer Hunter, a first-person hunting game. Still violent, but it’s hunting! People in the US of A love hunting, and that’s an untapped market!
Cue several different hunting and shooting games by a myriad of companies, including the scores of Cabela’s video games by Activision Value. But it wasn’t just hunting games. Hunting is basically shooting on an open range, and target ranges are popular, so why not games based on that?
There’s a handful of those too, including the infamous NRA Gun Club, a game I wrote about many years ago. In a sense, the game I’m talking about today is basically the spiritual successor to NRA Gun Club in more ways than one, and likely was made to cater to that same niche market that Deer Hunter did all those years ago. Except now it’s a bit more of a crowded market…
Reload, also called Reload: Outdoor Action in some regions, is a lightgun rail shooter. Yet another game that’s hard to find info on the web, much like when I wrote about Legendary. Reload was published by Mastiff, a brand mostly known for making shovelware fare during the late 2000s to early 2010s, like the Heavy Fire series among many other games. The developer on the other hand, Top3Line, is not a developer I’m familiar with, but I figure they’re yet another a dime-a-dozen bargain bin game developer. Reload came out for the Nintendo Wii, and later, bizarrely, on PC. For this article, I’m playing the PC version through Steam. I can’t imagine the Wii version being any different except looking a bit worse and a bit more Wii remote waggle.
There isn’t much of a story to Reload. Your player character goes to various target ranges with many different types of firearms, with a goal at each mission: Get a certain amount of points, avoid harming too many civilians, that kind of stuff. Fulfill the mission requirements and we’ll move on to the next stage with different requirements than the last. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We start with basic target ranges, with simple paper targets where aiming for critical parts like the bullseye rewards more points than just hitting the target. Strangely, our weapon of choice for these early missions is not something mundane like a 1911, Glock, or SIG-Sauer pistol, but it’s a two-toned black and golden Desert Eagle. That’s unusually tacky for something like this, but I guess it stands out. Also, I swear I heard the weapon sound in another game somewhere… must be imagining things.
Completing missions with enough points will reward medals, of which can unlock bonus goodies like new goggles, which make special targets appear in stages for bonus points; and new camouflages to add more targets to the area for more points. While there’s only about 21 stages overall, the game encourages replay value by unlocking these rewards and subsequently replaying older missions to potentially get better medals. I did this for a few stages, but there came a point where I was okay with just passing a level without failing.
After doing target practice with a pistol and an M16, we move on to the a new mission: going through into a “killhouse,” a warehouse area with targets for practice. If you’ve ever played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s tutorial section, then you’re familiar with the concept. In these, the game moves for you – it’s a rail shooter, not an FPS, after all – but you try to hit enemy targets as fast as you can without harming civilians for points.
Eventually we go outside, where we do actual skeet shooting. Compared to the one I remember playing on NRA Gun Club, where I had to save scum in the emulator I was playing on to even pass the missions; the ones in Reload were a breeze, with the only major challenges being how many clay pigeons appear at once and where they’re coming from. The shotgun has a bunch of ammo in its magazine, and if one is careful with their shots, it’s not that hard to beat. Oddly, the reload animation reminds me a bit of Soldier of Fortune: Payback’s, where the character is randomly shoving in 3 or so shells at once. Probably just a coincidence, right?
While doing all these missions, there is an unseen drill instructor going through the rules in each wave. In my opinion, these are fairly straightforward and really don’t need much in terms of instruction, but what do I know. What really makes it weird is how I’ll hear things like “shooter ready!” randomly or hearing the instructor say things that don’t match what’s happening on screen, like a “better luck next time” when I completed a section. It’s not the best work of famed voice actor Matthew Mercer, but perfectly serviceable, I guess.
After a round each of target practice, killhouses and skeet shooting, the game moves on into further “shoot enemies but not civilians” ranges, but instead of killhouses, we’re back to standard target ranges with a pistol and the shotgun from earlier. The shotgun one was especially tricky, because even though the spread isn’t that wide, I still ended up accidentally grazing civilian targets and being penalized a whopping 1000 points. For comparison, each enemy target gives roughly 100-200 points each, so it’s a rather big penalty.
My best strategy was to basically make sure the enemy was wide open, which often meant just waiting for a target to be at a safe distance to fire. Kind of annoying, and was the only mission I failed on.
We then go to a desert range where things really ramp up. Now targets will have a timer above them to indicate how long one has to take them out before they fire. Don’t worry, it’s just paint and not actual bullets, but I’m honestly amazed we have the technology for targets that can shoot back. These are one of the best parts because it at least feels like there’s an actual risk and strategy to the shooting, rather than just blindly firing targets as quick as I could.
But then we get to arguably my least favorite of all these levels: The sniper levels. In these, the player has to hold their breath (with the Spacebar) to hit long range targets that are hard to see even while scoped in. In one mission, I’m destroying mortars on the ground, with other explosives available for extra points. Another has me hitting targets that pop in and out, with bonus stationary targets with pumpkins on their heads.
I found it annoying to zoom in and out to properly hit targets, and holding breath with the Spacebar is critical to even hitting the targets. Reloading will take the player out of the scope view, have their crosshair jutter all over the screen for no good reason, and then immediately zoom back in, often to a different place than where I was looking, losing my position on a target that I was aiming for. On that mission with the pop up targets, this meant I missed out on hitting a lot of targets because I was having to re-orient where I was and couldn’t fire in time. Combined with the hold breath mechanic, makes these the worst out of all the missions in the game. If this is how annoying it is on PC, I can’t imagine playing this on Wii and even succeeding at these missions, what with how hard it can be to hold a Wii remote steady.
Bouncing back-and-forth between the somewhat exciting desert ranges with AK47s and M16s and the annoying sniper missions leads us to a set of missions where we’re given big guns like a machine gun and a grenade launcher. These are just for-fun “blow things up” missions, and while I can’t deny the destruction involved, it does seem a bit finicky, especially with the grenade launcher and not blowing up everything in sight.
The last mission is a straightforward rail shooter area through fake desert arenas where, again, you must shoot enemy targets before they shoot you with paint, and to avoid shooting civilians. These are different models than the previous ones which looked like ordinary people, whereas these just look like generic middle eastern people. There isn’t a whole lot else to say about these, but they’re at least somewhat fun to play compared to the more stationary targets I’ve been doing for most of the game.
After going through all 21 missions, there’s the option to restart or go back to previous missions to improve scores. There isn’t much else to unlock. There’s a casual target range mode, but beyond that there’s not much else to do upon completion.
It’s a game you can barrel through in less than two hours. Hell, if you’re quick enough, you could probably beat this game under two hours and get a refund from Valve. (If someone does decide to take on this challenge, please let me know. and please give me credit if you do!)
Now, I often tend to do a good chunk of research for these kind of articles. It’s often just simple stuff like checking Mobygames to see what the developers had worked on before, just to get a baseline on what to expect with the game. I often do this for some development studios that share developers, like how Jarhead Games, makers of NRA Gun Club, also worked at Piranha Games, makers of games like Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza, another game of theirs I wrote about. With Reload, I started noticing a few names that had several credits to their name, and when I cross-checked them, I started seeing games I had seen before. Some of which I had even played.
Chaser. Soldier of Fortune: Payback. Secret Service. Then it dawned on me. The weapon sound effects. The look and feel of the weapons firing. I realized I was playing a god damn Cauldron game in disguise.
Top3Line was (presumably) a subsidiary of Cauldron, a Slovakian games studio that was often known for their budget games. I’ve talked about Cauldron several times in this blog before, most recently for Soldier of Fortune: Payback back in November 2025. Outside of Reload, Top3Line often made smaller games for portables, such as a puzzle game called Puzzle Expedition: The Quest for the Tear of God, a block-pushing puzzle game that looked like a hybrid of Sokoban and The Lost Vikings; ESPIONAG3: Berlin Files for the boARd augmented reality system; and a handful of other cutesy budget shovelware for Big Fish Games. They were working on a strategy game called Gamma Protocol with Stratotainment, but that seemed to have been canceled after a few beta periods in 2018.
If I had to guess, Top3Line was meant to be Cauldron’s more “family-friendly” studio, where they made games that were different than their usual T-M rated action fare. This isn’t a unique thing: Sometimes developers would make spinoff studios with the same developers for specific projects that wouldn’t fit in their usual oeuvre, or so they can work on budget projects that would otherwise tarnish the main studio. See the aforementioned Jarhead/Piranha Games I mentioned earlier. This was fairly common among the game industry for a while.
I just can’t believe I got duped into playing yet another Cauldron game. I mean, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s a surprise how I end up stumbling upon playing another one of their games by complete accident.
Reload is inoffensive, but also unnecessary. If you wanna shoot at a target range, you’d be better off going to an actual range firing actual firearms. And if that isn’t your thing, there are better options for this kind of thing than having Matthew Mercer bark orders at you at random times. Hell, even as a lightgun game, it’s not that fun compared to its peers. Regardless of what platform you play it on, there are dozens of better options readily available on that respective platform. To me, this is the most pointless shooter I have ever played, and I’ve played my fair share of junk!
Reload is on Steam for $4.99, but I would not recommend buying it. It’s also in a bundle with Heavy Fire: Afghanistan and Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear, games that are also rail shooters but are a lot more fun to play. And those are by Teyon, who made Rambo the Video Game, a game I absolutely did not like at the time! You’ll definitely have more fun with those games than with this.
Feel free to slap me if I somehow write about yet another Cauldron-developed video game on my blog this year. I didn’t mind their work, but I just would rather be playing games by a different B-grade eurojank studio instead. At least then it would feel somewhat different.
Leave a Reply