Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets

Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets is a free demo that serves as an appetizer to the multiplayer focused shooter, Warm Gun, currently available for $4.99 on both iPhone and iPad. It's a simple way for interested consumers to jump in, shoot some targets and decide whether they want to fork over the dough for the more fully featured experience.

Problem is, the bland demo does a mediocre job.

Carnival of Bullets and its paid counterpart are first person shooters built from the ground up using Epic's Unreal Engine, and as such, both look impressive.

In this case, the developers at Emotional Robots did a nice job bringing the abandoned area to fruition, with a fun house, target ranges and a Ferris Wheel adorned with lights. It's a bit too dark for our liking, but for the most part, the designers deserve kudos.

That said, the actual game's a bit monotonous and irritating. You step into the role of The Preacher, one of six character classes. What ensues is a bit of target practice, as you go from location to location blasting wooden targets with either dual pistols (dubbed Heaven & Hell) or a shotgun by the name of Cain & Able; The Preacher also throws Holy Water bombs.

First problem: there's no control customization. You're stuck with dual sticks. The left works just fine. The right, on the other hand, is much too slow. Instead, we opted to aim by dragging a finger across the right side of the screen, but that often resulted in accidentally firing the weapons at random.

Supposedly, you're able to choose from two other control methods and adjust the analog stick sensitivity, but the fact that Emotional Robots forbids this in the demo is a huge downer. If players hate the default controls, they may skip Warm Gun altogether.

Then we have the mini games, none of which feature online leaderboards to compete for high scores. In fact, you can plow through everything in less than 30 minutes, and the actual games offer little to no challenge whatsoever.

Over the next few days, we plan to put Warm Gun through its paces to see if this multiplayer focused shooter has the right stuff to become a must have. Based on the demo, unfortunately, things got off to a rough start.

On the positive side, though, it's tough to argue with free.

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), and iPad. Requires iOS 3.1.3 or later.

Download Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets