Robin Hood: The Return of Richard Review

Figuring out that this is the latest WiiWare release to be ported from the iPhone isn’t too hard to do — Robin Hood: The Return of Richard is decidedly “mobile” in its look and feel. The subtitle would have you think it’s somehow story-driven, perhaps a small RPG or adventure game chronicling the period near the end of the classic Robin tale when the good King Richard finally comes home from the Crusades. But, no luck there. There’s hardly any story at all, as this is just a simple shooting gallery.

Waves of endless, mindless minions of the Sheriff of Nottingham swarm the screen from both sides of a set of open environments and it’s up to you to target them with an IR-controlled cursor and press the A Button to shoot them with an arrow. You do this constantly, again and again. It’s all you do. Reloading your quiver is assigned to B and you can scroll to the left and right a bit on each stage to get some slightly different viewpoints, but it’s primarily just pointing and shooting, pointing and shooting.

It’s actually not that bad, for what it is. The control works well enough and the music’s decent, so I wouldn’t be too terribly upset at someone for spending five bucks to download this. But as a whole package it’s far too limited to really recommend — it’s repetitive, it misses the chance to do anything interesting with its source material and it’s really just a quick port-up from its original iVersion with no extra effort given to make it stand out as a WiiWare title.