Johnny Trigger Review

Johnny Has High Hopes, Don’t Let Him Down

Say Games’ Johnny Trigger is a unique take on a simple click-to-shoot game. You play as Johnny, a skillful vigilante who battles criminals to maintain law and order in society. He’s athletic, heroic and pretty handy with a gun. Unlike most generic shooter games, with static maps and characters, Johnny Trigger offers dynamic movement and alternating speed of play. Each round flows from a start to an endpoint that Johnny navigates by running across and jumping over obstacles and occasionally doing incredible front and backflips. While witnessing Johnny’s incredible physical abilities is a blast, your focus needs to stay on the main objective – killing the bad guys.

To complete a level, it is imperative to kill each and every enemy. Johnny Trigger’s mechanics are incredibly simple: tap the screen when Johnny is aiming at the enemy and ensure he survives. However, timing is everything as there is zero room for error. Even one missed shot leads to an instant death, leaving you in the throes of grinding frustration.

Fresh Gaming Experience Each Round

The constantly changing ambiance of the game keeps the experience fresh. We get to watch Johnny take on bad guys in a variety of settings such as: shipyards, beaches, warehouses, and even coal mines. There are various interactive objects in game such as oil barrels and gas cans, which once can shoot to kill enemies once shooting them in the head becomes too pedestrian.

The title’s graphics are simple yet attention grabbing. The characters look like expertly drawn stick figures, which mixes well with the game’s overall theme of simplicity. What’s more, the contrast between the game environments and characters make the enemies and Johnny especially stand out.

Johnny Trigger’s Hollywood action film soundtrack is energetic and helps to create an overall immersive gaming experience. The game also provides various types of guns to choose from such as pistols, SMGs and super guns. All of them inflict the same amount of damage; but the unique burst sound of each gun makes and the variety of choices keeps the experience of shooting enemies engaging.

Needs to Be More Challenging

Johnny’s movements are completely automated and follow a set pattern each time. While watching Johnny do back flips is amusing at first, after a few levels it becomes monotonous.  These repetitive character movements significantly reduce the game’s difficulty as once the players knows the pattern, there’s simply no excitement left in the game. Johnny’s athletic movement in the initial levels is what makes the game immersive and fun to play. In order to keep the game engaging and pose a consistent challenge to players, the movements need to be variated. This can be done by adding more stunts that Johnny can execute. However, the current pool of stunts is limited and not enough to keep players engaged for a prolonged period of time.

Just like player movements, the map designs and enemy character placements are also repetitive. Every once in awhile when playing a level, you’ll think “didn’t I play this same map before?” And the answer is, yes, you did. The game simply changes the map’s background every 10-15 rounds, but the design and character placements remain the same.

There is absolutely no room for error in this game as even one missed shot leads to almost certain death. However, aiming is incredibly easy and basically the only thing you as the player have to do in the game. The fact that Johnny has unlimited bullets every round also significantly reduces the challenge. The number of bullets should be either a diminishing supply or limiting to the number of enemies per map to force players to utilize resources effectively.

While its repetitiveness and lack of a significant challenge drag it down a bit, Johnny Trigger is still worth your time. The title brings a fresh perspective to the domain of click-to-shoot action games, and its speed of play and lively audio make it one of the more unique action games on the market.