Shoot The Wall Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

“Are you really going to waste your time on this?” He asked. “That’s my wall. There’s nothing waiting on the other side for you.”

With hindsight, I probably should have listened to the narrator. Yet, something urged me to reload, to source another weapon, and to keep flinging bullets at a wall that, to my mind, was the iron gate to a land of untold secrets and spoils. I should have left it. I could have left it. With another pocket of cash and a swift reload, though, I’d find myself back at the same spot, with a belt of ammunition, an assault rifle, and more than enough bricks to keep me busy for hours. I wanted—no, needed to see what was on the other side. I just didn’t realize that I’d need to unload more than shells and upgrades to reach the core.

Shoot The Wall is a game that, well, you can decipher in the first twenty seconds or so. A bullet sponge of a wall stands before you, and a terminal sits at the back, with various weapons and upgrades. You unleash your fury against a barrage of bricks and, little by little, earn small sums of cash to invest in, well, more weapons and upgrades. The cycle repeats, and you, being at the edge of the knife, begin to spot the subtle difference in the terrain as you gradually carve deeper into its ever-winding brick-bloated labyrinth.

If you’re expecting a second layer to all of this, then I almost hate to break it to you, but there isn’t one. In fact, Shoot The Wall is as transparent as most mind-numbing incremental idle clickers of its kind, in that it keeps to the same set of rules, and that it centers its entire gameplay schematic around the same cycle. To that end, you don’t have a bottomless game here, but rather, a test. Bullets ricochet through the walls, and points tally up in tandem with dimly lit health bars. As you destroy a brick, you earn small bonuses, which in turn can grant you passage to greater weapons with a higher damage output. But of course, you get the idea.

It’s difficult to dress Shoot The Wall up as anything more than a pointless exercise. Because let’s face it, there is no point to it. Unlike, say, Backyard Digger, you don’t have sunken treasures to turf up, nor do you have a plot to unravel over a certain period of time. Instead, you have four different biomes, four endings, and a loop that could quite easily be summarized in an email. The question is, is it worth playing, if only for the brief spells of joy that stem from bulldozing a wall with a shotgun? Eh, kind of.

Shoot The Wall doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, nor does it string you along with the intention of dampening your spirits during the final chapter. No, it shows you the way forward, and it openly belittles your each and every input, either with a snide remark or a question. Why are you doing this, for example, tends to pop up every once in a while.

Here’s the bad news: Shoot The Wall isn’t a visually striking first-person shooter. Heck, it isn’t really a first-person shooter. If anything, it’s a cartoon-like cash grab that, annoyingly, is also oddly satisfying to plug through. Given that it lacks a photorealistic look or anything remotely close to it, it is a rather dull and somewhat barebones experience that’s about as much fun as watching paint dry on a cold afternoon. Yet, it has this irritating charm to it. Oh, you know that you’re wasting your time, and that there are millions of other things that you could be doing. Annoyingly, though, it grabs your attention and reels you in when you least expect it. You reload, and you keep shooting.

If the idea of watching numbers drizzle out from brick walls sounds like your idea of a good time, then it’s highly likely that you’ll enjoy spending forty minutes or so exfoliating your ammunition in this world. It is worth taking it all with a huge pinch of salt, mind you. Shoot The Wall isn’t a good game; it’s an impulse buy that you’ll love to hate, yet one that you will also find yourself playing through, regardless. The wall has secrets, and you will find them, even if it requires you to unload eighty-six rounds of rifle ammunition along the way.

If you can excuse the lack of technical polish and visual quality, then you should be able to enjoy Shoot The Wall for the bare necessities that it brings to the table. With that said, I wouldn’t expect a brilliant first-person shooter here. A game that can keep your itchy trigger finger active and your mind occupied, yes — but nothing more. Sorry, Dexter Manning.

Verdict

Shoot The Wall is the video game equivalent to the act of watching magnolia paint dry on a plank of wood: dull, painful, and yet oddly therapeutic. To call it a good game, though, couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a passable way to scratch an itch, but that’s about as far as it goes. Mindlessly entertaining in short bursts, for sure, but not quite the be all, end all of incremental first-person shooters.

It goes without saying at this point, but Shoot The Wall is as niche and as pointless as video games come. That being said, it does make for an oddly amusing experience. With four endings to unlock and enough bricks to keep your fingers on the trigger for a lengthy period of time, it delivers on its promise to waste your time with its own assets. It might not do a lot else to keep you feeding out of the palm of its hand, but I can vouch for its ability to make monotonous chores feel more rewarding — if only just. We’ll let you decide whether or not that’s enough of a boon to warrant the purchase.