With Russell Crowe doing his bit to bring Robin Hood back to our cinema screens recently, you may have expected someone to try and cash in on the new found popularity of Nottingham's legendary bowman. And we've got no problem with that, as a Robin Hood game would seem like a perfect fit with the Wii's motion controls, and it doesn't seem too hard to imagine how a game could capitalise on the myth and legend surrounding the archer. Sadly, Robin Hood: The Return of Richard isn't that game.
Dressing the legend of Robin Hood up in a game that feels like it's a student project that should be played in a web browser, not on your Wii, Robin Hood: The Return of Richard is a lightgun game that sets you the task of, strangely, not robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but instead using random passing knights as target practice. Using your Wii remote to move a cursor around the screen, it's up to you to point at the various evil knights that wonder slowly across your screen, before firing an invisible arrow in their general direction.
Shoot the big knight. It's not like you can miss him.
And, somewhat disappointingly, that's almost literally all there is to it. Each of the twelve levels is made out of pretty much the same shooting-fish-in-a-barrel exercise, and although it does have some novelty value for a while (mostly as you laugh at the comedic "ARRGHH" sound effects the knights make as you take them down), the whole experience quickly gets old, and the fact it doesn't tell you when you have to reload just annoys to the point of frustration.
The problem is, while the basic game's fine, it's the gaming equivalent of watching paint dry. There's no variety, nothing ever changes, and there's no sense of progression. Only a high score mode provides even the slightest incentive to play through again - either that, or the funky music, which is part medieval, part trance.
And even though it's only 500 points, there are still many more deserving games out there that you can spend your points on. While it's certainly OK for winding down after an athletic session of Wii Sports, or similar, once you've played through it once, there's very little to keep you coming back. Were there a bit more variety, or even a two player mode, it could have been saved from mediocrity, but, sadly, we've no such luck here.
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
