Review: Wild West Shooter
Back in 2010, a tiny UK developer called FunBox Media released a game on the Nintendo Wii that many consider one of the worst commercially released light gun games of all time, called Wild West Shootout, which featured terrible models, gameplay, and performance, and got wrong just about everything you could get wrong with a light gun game.
A few months ago, in October of 2025, a game with a similar title showed up on the Nintendo Switch platform, called Wild West Shooter, and it was also announced that the game would get a physical release that bundled in two gun attachments that could be used with both the Switch and the Switch 2 JoyCons for a more “authentic” light gun experience.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Wild West Shooter is a sort of spiritual sequel to Wild West Shootout, made by the same developer, so after receiving the game last month, I decided to fire it up and see if it was as bad as its predecessor.
I wasn’t prepared for just how bad this game could be in every imaginable way. Starting with the included gun attachments, while the build quality and the plastic used is fairly solid, the ergonomics and design of the device is about as bad as it can be. The handle grip was made extra wide to support the Switch 2 JoyCon’s increased size, and as a result, the handle is extremely uncomfortable and makes it hard to pull the trigger comfortably, even for someone with larger-than-average hands.
Another negative factor is that the gun attachment orients the JoyCon vertically instead of horizontally, which generally doesn’t work well for most games, with the horizontal orientation usually yielding some better results for accuracy and performance. I tested the guns on both the Switch 1 and Switch 2, and neither one made a difference in the comfort or performance; these guns are just bad.
Moving on to the game itself, things just get shockingly even worse on all fronts. For starters, the game is one of the laziest and most poorly-developed games in recent years, using mostly stock Unity assets to build one of the ugliest and worst-performing shovelware games in modern times. It even uses a few assets and models that pulled from Wild West Shootout, a game from over 15 years ago, and they look even worse here than they did on the Wii.
It’s almost comical how bad the game is, yet there’s no joy or actual laughter to be had from the experience at all. Especially on the Switch 1, the performance is so poor that it feels like the game shouldn’t have even been published on the platform, and even though it does run quite a bit better on the Switch 2, it doesn’t make the game enjoyable by any means. On the Switch 1, the framerate drops so low so often that it becomes nearly unplayable, with some entire stages chugging along at somewhere around 10-20 FPS, which is unacceptable for a game released in 2025. When you also factor in the performance with the awful controls, it makes the whole thing even worse.
Aside from even using horrendous old stock assets to build the game, they even neglected to actually modify or expand on the stock levels and areas, only populating them with terrible 3D characters with barely any animations. Embarrassingly, they also left in a lot of the stock sound effects that come with Unity stock assets, and the enemies, despite looking like outdated and fairly racist “cowboys and indians” characters, constantly make the default Unity zombie growling sound effects for their speech instead of anything that actually fits the characters.
As far as gameplay, playing with the analog sticks is painfully bad, but unfortunately, trying to play with the JoyCon gyro/light gun setup might be even worse. The menus barely give you any information as to how to set things up on the hardware side for gyro play, and the game literally will not function with a single JoyCon, despite the included gun attachments being designed for single JoyCon play.
This forces you to have two of them just to perform the basic functions of the game, which are simply shooting and reloading. Aside from this, even once you start playing with both JoyCons, the sensitivity is wildly uncomfortable and only has 5 options for sensitivity, none of which really made the accuracy better.
The sensitivity always feels off, and even when using some of the much better gun attachments that I own for Switch 1 and Switch 2, it never felt good to play, constantly getting off-center much more often than most similar light gun games on Switch. Also, the function to re-center your aim that’s absolutely crucial to playing any light gun game on Switch has a 3-second timer that counts down before it actually re-centers, which, in this game, is nearly enough time to get you killed from full health by the unbalanced amount of enemies on screen most of the time.
While I did manage to get through the whole game after around two hours of painful and slow progress from struggling with the controls and unbalanced difficulty (and hoping the game wouldn’t crash, which happened several times,) no part of it was ever fun or felt like an authentic light gun experience. This is an experience I truly can’t recommend to anyone, even given its low price point for the physical package, since the guns and the game are nearly worthless, functionally.
The game was also released on the PS5 platform digitally, but since the PS5 has no options for light gun style gameplay aside from the generic DualSense gyro controls, I didn’t see a reason to check this version out, but I can’t see how it being on that platform could so drastically change the quality of the game to make it worth paying money for.
I’ll have an article about the history and current state of light gun style games on the Switch hardware posted in the near future that will offer some much better options than this game if you’re looking for decent light gun titles in the console’s library, but this is one to stay far away from at all costs.