
Point Blank is littered with funky ditties, random festival music and catchy jingles. That said, the animation, distinction, movement and general physics are solid and glitch-free, and the hit-detection is bang on the button. It’s a factor the arcade original suffered from, but the PlayStation version underlines it more to the point where is can become a slight distraction, and isn’t easy on the eye. This mostly happens with zooming effects and perspective scaling. With aiming accuracy a vital element, the target sprites are well defined for the most part, with few ‘jaggies’ here and there. It’s a style which fits well with the kind of fairground/circus themes aimed at, even the enemy shoot-out games have that carnival stall feel to them, and this is essential in delivering the light hearted mood. Garish colours and loud hues leap out from the moment the selection screen appears, primary colours in abundance together with cheeky little details and comedy facets. It’s a fast paced game, so any hesitancy or complacency with the trigger is met with failure in many situations. Some simply require everything on screen to be destroyed, others have a set goal of either hit targets or points, or a single pin-point shot, but all of them are against the clock so dawdling is not an option, and incorrect targets hit is harshly dealt with. Set against an anime styled environment are the contests, which oblige different player attributes to achieve the targets they set. Individual events are bountiful, over 30 types of varying difficulty, and all must be completed to reach the Point Blank castle the final stage which is as tricky as they come. They also appear many times themselves in the actual events, even becoming a target or hostage in certain scenarios.
#Point blank game how to
After each game you get graded and judged by the ever present Muppet-ish duo of Dr Don and Dr Dan, who score your performance and give hints on how to play each stage. Point Blank simulates the cartoon milieu in a tournament-style shooting contest.

So let’s blast away without a care, knowing we will leave the gunfight without a single scratch. Sounds dull? No chance, because this formula provides the backdrop for one of the most enjoyable light-gun games on the PlayStation.

With this shooter, our targets are soft toys, cardboard cut-outs, inanimate objects and, erm… targets themselves. We are taken into a world of innocent playtime, where nobody gets killed and everyone is up for the larks. Sounding like some kind of gangster light-gun jaunt, it couldn’t be further removed from the typical renegade soldier missions. However, Namco took a different turn in 1994 with the arcade release of Point Blank. Gallery shoot ‘em ups from the 90s can easily be generalised as gung-ho military slaughter-fests, personified by the likes of Operation Wolf and Cabel.
