Publisher: Digital Prunes
Developer: Digital Prunes
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now

The iPhone may well be the greatest thing I’ve ever purchased. I’ve virtually no sense of time or space, and the phone does both of those things for me. So long as I keep my iPhone charged, I will probably never be bored again. That is, of course, unless I use it to play Slingshot Cowboy.

Slingshot Cowboy is a sort of stationary first-person-shooter in which your weapon is, you guessed it, a slingshot. Your targets? Cows. What did these cows do to deserve this kind of treatment? Who knows, but the further away they are, the more points you get for shooting them, and that’s pretty much all that you need to know to play.

The game feels a lot like the hunting part of Oregon Trail, except for how it utilizes the iPhone’s touch sensitivity to judge how far back you’re drawing the sling. You can also adjust your aim to hit faraway targets by tilting the phone itself. Between rounds of shooting side-scrolling cows, you’ll be challenged to bonus rounds in which cows stampede at you while you try to stave them off by shooting them in the face.

As novel as the control scheme is, it isn’t very accurate. You can choose to use a form of laser guidance for your slingshot, but that doesn’t eliminate problems with the touch sensitivity. Even if it did, the game would then become mind-numbingly easy, instead of mind-numbingly frustrating.

The look of the game is on the funny and cute side, and the graphics are pretty seamless. The sound, however, doesn’t add enough to warrant putting on your headphones instead of just keeping the phone on silent. The menus are pretty intuitive, but of course, there’s really not much to them.

For my money, I’d rather play a puzzle game, or something with a little more novelty. I tend to play my iPhone in transit, and these types of controls are tough to master while in motion. Even sitting on the couch at home, the controls for Slingshot Cowboy can be infuriating. All that aside, there are just too many things I’d rather do with my time than shoot virtual cows with a virtual slingshot.

Our Score:

Our Recommendation: