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.
