Despite being one of the pioneers of bringing light gun experiences into our homes back in the 1980s, Nintendo hasn’t given too much attention to light gun style games since the Wii, when that console’s motion control and infrared tracking functionality ushered in a revival of sorts for the genre from the mid-2000s until the mid-2010s. Their next console, the Wii U, did very little to keep that momentum in the genre alive, despite also having compatibility with the WiiMotes, other than releasing Duck Hunt, Hogan’s Alley, and Wild Gunman on the Virtual Console, which could be played natively with the WiiMotes.

As of 2026, Nintendo hasn’t chosen to make any new first-party games in the genre or bring any of their classic light gun titles to the Switch via the Switch Online subscription service. The service hosts hundreds of emulated games from their past consoles, where they could utilize the gyro aiming or touch screen functionality to make these games playable on the hardware. Instead, it’s been third-party developers who have been attempting to use the technology of the Switch’s hardware to bring these types of games back to life, even if the quality of the games have shown varying results.

While it is true that gyro aiming on the Switch can be frustrating in general, since the gyro technology that’s included in the Switch 1’s JoyCon hardware is pretty primitive and outdated, it doesn’t mean you can’t still have some fun with some of these titles, and even be able to enjoy them on-the-go if you choose. If you’re an old-school light gun purist, you’ll have to check your expectations at the door, since playing with gyro aiming is a far cry from playing with light guns on a CRT monitor, but it can still be fun if you’re in the right mindset.

There’s been quite a few different gun attachments produced for the Switch, which all work in various ways and to varying degrees of success when it comes to re-creating the feel of a light gun game on the platform, and we’ll get into depth about most of those throughout the course of this writing.

As a side note, every Nintendo Switch game is also playable on the Switch 2 console, which does have better gyro technology built into the new JoyCons (as well as an under-utilized mouse functionality) but due to the way most of the Switch 1 games were programmed, you won’t see much added benefit to playing them on the Switch 2, unless otherwise noted. It’s of note that as of a year since its launch, there hasn’t been a single new native light gun game released on the Switch 2 other than an upgraded version of Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery.

The criteria for a game to be covered here is that it needs to have gyro control functionality (allowing it to at least approximate the feeling of playing with a light gun,) it must also be an entire game devoted to the same type of gameplay (not just a mini-game within another game,) and it must be on-rails, so there’s no free movement required in the gameplay.

I’ve tried to generally arrange them in order of which are the best and most unique experiences on the Switch, starting with the best ones and moving downward, taking into consideration everything from the general gameplay, performance, and art design, as well as how well the gyro aiming is implemented and how well it works with gun attachments.

Here’s the lowdown on what’s available on the platform and a little bit about each game.

Assault Chainguns KM

If you’ve ever played and loved Sega’s classic 90s light gun series that consists of Gunblade NY and L.A. Machineguns, then Assault Chainguns KM will be for you, since it’s essentially a spiritual sequel to those games, which Sega never ended up making themselves. Made by a solo Japanese developer, this game is an absolute blast if you like the previously mentioned games, as it nails the look, feel and sound of them, and has some pretty decent gyro aiming on the Switch.

The game works quite well with the single-hand gun attachments, since the only function you have in the game is aiming and shooting, so there’s no extra commands to worry about, except for the inevitable task of having to re-center your aim when the gyro aiming gets off track. The game is an arcade-style blast from the past and feels like a lost entry to Sega’s awesome light gun series, and is definitely worth checking out for a few dollars on the eShop.

House of the Dead 1 & 2 Remakes

The remakes of Sega’s first two classic games in the House of the Dead series received ports on the Switch, with the first remake being a trimuph in some ways, but not without its share of issues, especially on the Switch version. However, the remake of the 2nd game leaves a lot to be desired on all fronts, and while it could still be fun for some, its rough edges are a pretty frequent annoyance and make it hard to recommend to most players.

The great thing about both games is that they feature a ton of options to tweak your gyro aiming experience, and while it can be a decent amount of extra work to get it dialed in to feel just right for your setup, and will never be perfect, it can be one of the best light gun style experiences on the Switch.

The Namco arcade style gun attachment pictured here was officially included with a version of the first House Of The Dead Remake released in Europe, and it’s easily one of the best gun attachments for the Switch, I just wish it wasn’t so hard to track down for those who’d like to have one.

Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery

If you’ve ever been to or at least seen a Japanese natsu matsuri (Summer festival) in an anime or movie, you might have a good idea of the aesthetics you’ll get with Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery, since the game replicates the physical shooting galleries usually found at these festivals. Similar to the stalls at the festivals, your goal in the game is to shoot down the prizes you’d like to win with low-powered projectile guns, with each prize having its own unique weight distribution and difficulty to knock down. These kinds of stalls were pretty popular at many similar Western carnivals and amusement parks in the past, but they’ve been appearing less and less since the early 2000s, so you may also have some familiarity with them from that.

The game supports up to 3 players simultaneously, as you compete to see how many of the prizes you can knock down within a time limit, and you’ll eventually face off against a horde of ghosts and Japanese yokai monsters after you’ve knocked down enough prizes, and have the chance to earn a huge bonus if you defeat them all. The game has a handful of unlockable features that become very grindy yet addicting to complete, and though the game gives you very little tutorials on the more advanced mechanics, it can still be a lot of fun, with the gyro aiming working quite well, all things considered.

The game works well with just about any gun attachment with one strange caveat, in that you’ll need to access the SL and SR buttons on the side of the JoyCon in order to continue putting in virtual coins into the game to keep your ammo stocked, and these buttons are typically not very accessible with any of the gun attachments. As a workaround, you can just hold the coin button for a few seconds when first starting your game and before you put the JoyCon into the attachment then you’ll be able to play for quite a while without having to restock your ammo.

Operation Night Strikers

Operation Night Strikers is a collection of four games, with three of them being classic Taito light gun style games, namely Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt, and Space Gun. As stated in my review from last year, this collection has a lot of great things going for it, in that all three of the light gun games here are bona fide classics that are still fun today, and the Switch version of this collection plays and controls just a bit better than the PC version in most regards.

That doesn’t mean this collection is perfect, as it has its own set of small issues, but this is easily one of the best light gun style experiences on the Switch platform. However, it also comes with a bit of a hefty price tag (especially if you want the DLC packs with extra ports of the games,) so your mileage will vary depending on how into these classic games you are and how much you end up paying for it. The games work pretty well with most of the gun attachments in general, though you’ll need to access some of the face buttons as you play.

S.N.I.P.E.R. - Hunter Scope

While it’s clearly a mobile port that still has remnants of some of its mobile FOMO/gatcha features intact, S.N.I.P.E.R. is a very fun game overall and plays very well with the gyro aim. Like a mix of a standard light gun game with a bit of Silent Scope mixed in, this one has a few different types of stages with slightly different gameplay between each, and it manages to keep things interesting even though the stage and enemy layout stay pretty similar throughout.

The grindy progression to unlock more levels and features is a little annoying, but not too bad overall compared to some games I’ve played. The menus/tutorials don’t always do a very good job of teaching you what you need to know or accurately showing you what the controls are, but once you figure it out, this is a very worthwhile game, though the standard price may be slightly high for what you get here.

Similar to some of the other games here, this one has several control features required from both hands, and using a two-handed JoyCon gun attachment might add something to the experience for you, or it might feel better using them loose in each hand. In any case, this is one of the better light gun style experiences on the Switch no matter which controller style you choose.

Western 1849 Reloaded

Western 1849 Reloaded is an interesting title that combines a cover shooter with arcade style mechanics, feeling a bit like a slower version of something like Time Crisis 5, where you switch between several different spots of cover strategically and pop up at the right times to aim and take down your enemies. There’s quite a number of stages to go through, but in order to experience them all, you’ll need to fight your way through escalating difficulty levels, but you’ll also be earning money to upgrade your stats and equipment along the way.

This strikes a nice balance of strategic gameplay but also choosing what to upgrade in order to get the best results, and while it can be a bit grindy in this way, it’s still a fun experience all around for a pretty cheap price.

This is one game where I found that neither the single or double hand gun attachments really work very well, since many controls are needed on both hands and having the JoyCons stuck inside a gun makes the aim feel less natural in some ways, but it may work for you. Definitely give this one a try as its one of the most solid experiences on the Switch and the gyro aiming works quite well overall.

Mad Bullets

Mad Bullets is an interesting game to talk about, since it’s been ported to so many different platforms over the years with different control styles and content available between each one, starting with its original release on mobile phones back in 2014, using touch screen controls. The mobile version of the game was particularly grindy and lacking in features, as it was built to be a game that’s replayed almost endlessly in quick runs with high difficulty in order to keep unlocking more abilities and features and continuing to hunt higher scores, with the game content looping quite a bit.

This version was ported to PC in 2016, and then an arcade version released in 2020 with the title changed to Wild West Shooter (not to be confused with the Wii game of the same title,) which removes all of the grind and adds lots of new stages and content to the game, but that’s not the one that’s available on the Switch.

The Switch version, released in 2019, is unique from all the others, where it takes out the grind elements and instead of running in short, repetitive loops, it separates all the gameplay into 60 short mini-stages, which makes the game much more palatable and interesting. It also adds support for 4 players simultaneously, which is the only game on this list that supports that many besides the very messy Martian Panic.

The art style is a fun mix of cartoonish wooden cutouts of enemies that jump out as you run through the game’s several areas as you also try to collect treasure and items along the way, and plays well with the gyro aiming, even though there’s not many features to fine-tune it to your liking, but it’s still a decently fun game that should keep you entertained for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the gun attachments that the physical version of the game comes with (pictured above) don’t work well at all, but it does work pretty well with any other attachments.

Until The Last Bullet

Until The Last Bullet is a strange indie zombie-shooting light gun game with FMV animations of real life actors for enemies and real photos for the backgrounds, similar to something like Corpse Killer, aesthetically, though the gameplay is much more interesting here. It’s made by a small Polish developer, and it’s a little hard to describe, though it’s fairly unique and charming in its own way. The game was also ported to PC, but that version is not compatible with any PC light guns, making the Switch version generally the best one, given the circumstance.

There’s live action FMV story sequences in between each stage, following a very light story, but it’s nice to have more context for what you’re doing, and to get familiar with the characters and environments you’re seeing as you play. The gameplay focuses on prioritizing the threat of each type of zombie that comes at you at any given time while also carefully choosing your weapons and reload times, (which tend to be quite long,) and the gameplay is pretty compelling for a small indie game. A few new mechanics get thrown in later in the game, where you’ll eventually have multiple screens to monitor as the zombie horde closes in on you and it gets quite challenging by the end.

There’s a bit of a caveat, in that this plays decently well with the gyro aiming, but requires several buttons to be reached on both hands, so it doesn’t play very well with any kind of gun attachment and is better controlled just holding the JoyCons in both hands.

Dead Z Meat

Dead Z Meat is a mildly satisfying zombie horde shooter where you mow down wave after wave of different zombie types as you work your way across a board game-style world map, with generally very little variation in gameplay other than a few select stages that take on a more sniper-type experience. There’s a lot more to be said about the game in my full review from earlier this year. Even though the review is for the PC version, most of the thoughts in that review are also true of the Switch version, other than the visuals/performance being more lacking on the Switch and the controls being slightly different but equally problematic.

Since the PC version had some issues that the Switch version didn’t have, and vice versa, I’d say they’re about equal in quality for different reasons, but can still be some mindless fun if you don’t mind the gyro aiming, and it works well with any gun attachment.

Time Carnage

Time Carnage is a game that was adapted from originally being a VR horde shooter, where you stand in the same place and fight off waves of enemies by turning the camera left or right, but it does feel a bit like a light gun shooting gallery in a certain sense. You’ll fight off waves of monsters and creatures from several different locations and time periods as you go, but most of it feels like recycled stock assets and don’t do anything to inspire from a visual standpoint.

There’s several aspects that make the experience fall apart, the first being the fact that the game is terribly repetitive and not very fun without the VR element, but also in that it’s not very easy to control on the Switch. The left JoyCon controls your aiming in gyro mode (this can’t be changed) and the right one is used for shooting only, but you’ll also need to access all of the shoulder buttons on both JoyCons for shooting and reloading on both hands.

It can work pretty well with a two-handed gun attachment, but it’s hard to get a lot of enjoyment from this game in general, so explore at your own risk.

Arcade Machine: Clown Hunt

Not a whole lot can be said about Clown Hunt, other than it has a small amount of content that consists of looping shooting gallery screens in a circus environment where you shoot evil-looking 2D clown cutouts, but there’s so little gameplay here, and there’s not much fun in it. You’ll just be competing against your own high scores or playing the 2-player mode with a friend to compete there, but the gameplay doesn’t really change the patterns much, so it gets tiresome very quickly.

The good thing is that the gyro aiming works pretty well, with one strange exception, in that when you press the button to re-center your aim, it only re-centers the horizontal axis, where the vertical axis doesn’t reset at all, which can make aiming more of a chore than it needs to be, even if it still mostly works. Playing with a one-handed gun attachment is the best way to go here for the short time you’ll probably spend with the game at all.

Duck, Quack, Shoot!

Duck, Quack, Shoot! is a simple little 2D carnival-style shooter type game with very basic gameplay and decent utilization of the gyro aiming, making for a serviceable experience when using a gun attachment, but it only consists of very short rounds at a shooting gallery and has no other content or modes. It’s a little more fun competing with a friend in the two-player mode, but still leaves very little gameplay to experience here.

Speaking of gun attachments, some versions of the game from outside the US were available with the adorable gun attachment pictured above, which is also one of the better attachments available for the Switch and Switch 2. There’s two different physical releases of the game, where one version only included one of the generic rifle style attachments that you see most commonly for Switch and not a 2-player set. Similar to the House of the Dead Remake gun mentioned above, I wish there were more of these 2-player sets readily available in other parts of the world, since they improve the game experience of any game it’s used on.

As a note on using gun attachments with this game, the JoyCon must sit horizontally while aiming or it will not work correctly.

Martian Panic

Martian Panic is a port of a Wii game that was originally released in 2010, but shockingly, the Switch version somehow performs worse than the Wii version, with terrible framerates, performance, and hit detection, plus some added gyro annoyance with barely any adjustable features/options. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill light gun game with some decent gameplay along with some cute-but-ugly aesthetics that go for a 1950s B-movie sci-fi approach and mostly do a decent job.

Unfortunately, because the performance is so bad, it makes the Wii version preferable in every way, so this one gets knocked down a few notches. Some releases of the physical Switch version did come packaged with the very novel ray gun attachment (pictured above,) which also lights up and makes sounds when pulling the trigger, but is actually terrible as a gun attachment for the purpose of playing any game with it. The game works a bit better with other attachments that hold the JoyCon horizontally, but it makes this whole release a bit botched due to some pretty bad game development (porting) and peripheral design.

This also came out on PC at the same time as it launched on Switch, and unfortunately that version is also quite broken and won’t even allow you to finish the first level without implementing a fix that locks the framerate, so it shows the developers really didn’t spend much time making sure these ports were even functional before release.

Crazy Chicken/Moorhuhn series

Back in the late 1990s, a series of shooting gallery style games for the PC took off in Europe, which started as advertisement games for a German company and later spawned an entire franchise that spans dozens of games in all kinds of genres including kart racers, platformers, FPS, VR, point-and-click adventures, sports, gambling, and more. The original game (called Moorhuhn in Germany,) is simply a shooting gallery where you use your mouse to shoot at cartoon/claymation style chickens as they fly across the screen in large numbers, with a short timer counting down, and the goal being to get the highest score before the time runs out. There eventually came to be 19 different shooting gallery games in this series for PC, which all followed generally the exact same gameplay with slightly different chicken designs and background art.

Coming to the Nintendo Switch side of this, there’s currently 9 of the shooting gallery games in the series that have been ported to Switch, and they all run pretty well and function decently well with the gyro aiming, but the major downside is that the games just aren’t really fun. You’ll usually get bored about half way through a run and want it to end before long, especially with the earlier games in the series.

With a few of the more recent entries, there’s at least multiple stages and generally a little bit more going on, but not really enough to warrant buying or playing any of these. Crazy Chicken Xtreme is the one with the most production value and content if you’re just really curious about what the series has to offer, but it’s still one of the least interesting light gun style experiences available on the Switch.

Most of these work well enough with gun attachments, since you only need the trigger and a reload button, but most of them don’t allow you to choose which JoyCon you want to use for the gyro aim, so you’ll have to adjust to that accordingly.

Chicken Range

Chicken Range is a very bare-bones experience and is essentially an extremely basic shooting gallery game that looks like an old browser-based Flash game, and feels in the same vein as the Crazy Chicken series, though it’s generally even less fun and with far less production value than those games. This one is hard to justify playing at all, so play at your own risk.

The gyro aiming is bad no matter which attachment you use, with no options to adjust sensitivity and the game simply has very little to enjoy as a whole. Some regions got a version that’s packaged with the rifle attachment shown here, but it doesn’t do much of anything to help with the immersion or aiming experience, even though the game does require both JoyCons to play.

Wild West Shooter

If you thought things couldn’t get worse than this game’s predecessor on the Wii, titled Wild West Shootout from 2010, you may want to think again. This is easily one of the worst light gun style experiences on the Switch, as I stated in my review from earlier this year. It’s hard to understate just how shoddy and unfinished this game is in nearly every way, and I wouldn’t recommend it to even my worst enemies. Even though it’s cheap, I’d mostly avoid interacting with it in general.

There is a slight caveat in that the PS4/PS5 and Switch 2 versions of the game do run and control just slightly better, but it’s not enough to warrant paying money for this in either case. As also mentioned in the original review, the gun attachments that come with the physical version of the game are quite useless for pretty much any game due to the more vertical orientation of the JoyCons, and since the gyro aiming barely even works at all in this game in particular, you have to wonder why they bothered to include them.

Honorable mentions:

Here’s a section of some honorable mentions of games that technically fall in the light gun genre but don’t quite make the cut of the criteria for the main article, and I’ll explain why they didn’t quite make the cut.

Gal☆Gun series

The Gal☆Gun series started in 2010, with the first entry mixing cute anime aesthetics with fairly naughty dating sim storylines/mechanics into a package with light gun gameplay. It quickly became a favorite of mine upon release, despite the original Xbox 360 version not supporting any kind of light gun or motion control for aiming and never seeing a Western release. About a year later, a port for PlayStation 3 was released in Japan, and it supported aiming with the PS Move controller, transforming the game closer into a true light gun experience and it transcended its original release.

In 2015, a spinoff/sequel called Double Peace was released on PS4 and PS Vita, and in 2018, a true sequel, titled Gal☆Gun 2 followed on PS4 and Switch, but unfortunately, Double Peace did not allow you to play with light gun controls like the PS3 port of the first game did, leaving you to only use the analog stick for aiming. Gal☆Gun 2 did allow use of Gyro aiming on PlayStation 4 or Switch (or using VR on PC.)

In 2021, a remastered version of the first game was ported to Switch, followed by Double Peace getting a Switch port in 2022. The unfortunate part about the series on the Switch platform is that only Gal☆Gun 2 is playable with gyro aiming, and the other two are stuck only using the analog stick, which falls slightly outside of my criteria for being included in the main list.

The games are a lot of fun, but you’re best off playing the first game on PS3 or PC if you want to play it like a real light gun game, though the Switch port of Gal☆Gun 2 is the closest you can get to a light gun gameplay experience with that game other than using VR on PC.

Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics

Back in 2005, Nintendo published Clubhouse Games for the Nintendo DS, which featured an assortment of around 40 board games, card games, and other tabletop games, and was a pretty big success at the time. Fifteen years later, in 2020, they released this follow-up for the Switch, which has a whopping 51 different games in it, and the reason it’s on this list and not in the main section is because one of these 51 games is a shooting gallery with gyro aiming, simply called Shooting Gallery!

The gyro works quite well (I’d hope so, for a first-party game,) but the amount of gameplay you’ll get is pretty small, with some repetitive target patterns, but it is fun while it lasts. If you happen to own this one, you may not have even noticed this minigame is there, but its worth checking out, especially with a good one-handed gun attachment, and it’s fun with two players, or just using both guns yourself. Sadly enough, this is the closest thing to a first-party shooting game on this list.

Corpse Killer

Corpse Killer is a product of the FMV game craze that struck in the 1990s, when one of the biggest players in that market was developer Digital Pictures, who made games like Night Trap, Ground Zero: Texas, Double Switch, and several others, as well as Corpse Killer. The game drops you on a tropical island with a mission to stop a mad scientist who’s creating zombies, and the game mixes live-action cutscenes with shooting sections that require you to shoot zombie sprites of real actors as they fly towards you on the screen. The story and cutscenes are silly fun, with their heavily campy B-horror movie vibes, though the gameplay is pretty repetitive and doesn’t hold a lot of weight, but the game is still enjoyable for what it is.

After originally releasing in the 1990s on Sega CD, 3DO, and Saturn, it received a remastered port on PS4 and PC in 2019, then for the Switch in 2020. Unfortunately, the Switch version does not support gyro aiming, so this had to go in the honorable mentions for that reason.

Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission

The most recent entry in the long-running classic Operation Wolf series, First Mission was originally built as a VR game and later ported to a few other platforms with tweaked gameplay to account for it not being in VR anymore. It added some cover mechanics that make it feel a little bit like an indie version of a Time Crisis game, and is generally pretty fun, even if the gameplay and visual design feels slightly generic as there are some stock assets used.

The big downside to the Switch port is that it doesn’t support gyro aiming at all, which seems like a massive oversight for a game with such a pedigree of light gun history, but this is sadly the case. The game can be played on PC without VR as well, and sorta works with light guns, so that may be the only way you can really approach this feeling like a light gun experience outside of playing in VR.

Cabela’s The Hunt

Cabela’s is an American tradition that spans back to the early 1960s, with their brand of outdoor retail stores spread all across the nation, and in 1998, they also started commissioning game developers to make a variety of video games, most of them being not-so-thinly veiled advergames for their stores and products. Over the years, they’ve released games of several different types or genres, but the majority of them are pretty average-to-bad hunting simulators, which consist of attempting to slay or capture all kinds of different animals across the world, and using Cabela’s brand equipment accomplish your goal!

In 2018, one of these hunting games called The Hunt got a port to the Switch, and the reason it doesn’t qualify for the main section here is because the game is essentially split into to halves, one being a story or career mode where the gameplay is essentially just a boring first-person shooter game, and the other half being hunting-related minigames, including six on-rails light gun style or shooting gallery mini-games. These games don’t run or play all that well, but the gyro aiming does work surprisingly well for what it is.

This originally came packaged with a very basic and cheap bespoke shotgun attachment that fits two JoyCons, but you’d be able to use any gun attachment with this game, though you will need to access the analog stick from time to time for aim adjustment.

Hopefully this has given you an overall idea of what the Switch has to offer as far as light gun style games, and maybe you even found some to check out if you’re an enthusiast like myself who owns the console and likes the idea of having these types of experiences on-the-go, or simply enjoys getting the most out of every console you own in regards to the genres you enjoy.

In any case, let’s hope the Switch 2 ends up getting some fun light gun style games for us to look back on in a few years, and maybe Nintendo will step up and show some love for their old first-party light gun titles from the past in some form. Stay tuned for a lot more explorations of various console libraries when it comes to light gun games, and I’ll see you next time.

A Guide to Nintendo Switch Light Gun Games in 2026