Cover Fire: Offline Shooting Game

Genre: Shooting Gallery Game

Players: 1

.

Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS AND LOOTBOXES AND USES WAIT MECHANICS

The conspicuously-named Cover Fire: Offline Shooting Game (sometimes just called Cover Fire) is a free-to-play Shooting Gallery Game released on mobile devices in 2018, ported to PC in 2021, and then brought to Nintendo Switch in 2022. In this game, players control various members in a crew of some sort of modern military force fighting some sort of shady enemy. The details aren’t exactly clear.

The visuals in this game are decent, but nothing impressive, making use of 3D visuals that seem a generation or two out of date. At the very least I can say that the game is polished, the framerates are generally smooth, and the menus look nice (though they were clearly designed with mobile devices in mind). This is backed by a militaristic soundtrack, gun noises, and not much else – your characters’ lines are spoken in text, not voiced dialogue.

Despite its mobile roots, the core gameplay here is actually pretty fun, playing like a heavily boiled-down cover shooter. Players mainly try to aim to take down targets and time their shots to avoid incoming fire, and there’s some decent variety between the different character types (assault, sniper, demolitions, etc.), and different types of enemies. There’s even a zombie mode here that makes for a nice change of pace.

However, two elements really detract from the experience here. Firstly, each of this game’s missions is ridiculously short, often completed in a span of seconds rather than minutes. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t boot you back to the menu each time – the way the game does this really slows down the action.

Secondly, this game’s microtransactions are outright nasty, hounding you at every turn to use one of numerous different resources (and spend money if you don’t have enough), annoying you with wait mechanics for numerous things (or spend money if you’re impatient)… it gets tiresome extremely quickly.

One more thing I should note here – this game does technically allow for players to use the original touchscreen controls, but you are much better off using traditional gamepad controls, which allow for far better accuracy.

In the end, Cover Fire seems like a game that had some potential for good arcadey fun, but I think much of that potential was quashed by the game’s nasty microtransactions insisting on constantly gumming up the works and slowing everything down, from the mission structure to the wait mechanics, to the simple act of progressing. There’s still enjoyment to be found here, but you have to put up with so much harassment to get to it, I’m not sure it’s really worth it.

tl;dr – Cover Fire is a Shooting Gallery Game that plays like a simplified cover-based shooter. The core mechanics of the gameplay are fun, but this game is crippled by its extremely insistent microtransactions and wait mechanics constantly harassing you. As a result, what could have been a fun, lighthearted game just ends up feeling gross. Don’t waste your time with it.

Grade: C-

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