Smell Shooter for iOS

The App Store has tens of thousands of games - some of them incredible and industry-changing and others simply trying to capitalize on the surging interest in the iPhone and iPad devices. Smell Shooter is somewhere in between. It offers some interesting ideas, but the majority of the game is derivative of other better established brands. The actual gameplay is at times frustrating, and at best boring when played for more than a handful of minutes.

The mechanics are simple in theory but fail in execution for a number of reasons. You are supposed to aim the iPhone to move the crosshairs on the screen, tilting it forward and back and side-to-side to move and then shoot whichever color creature has been highlighted on the screen. If you shoot the wrong colored creature you lose a life, and if you lose all of your lives you must either wait for them to refill or pay $0.99 to buy 100 new lives. We found the tilt controls largely unresponsive, and because the app has not been upgraded for iOS and the iPhone 5, likely it is an issue of compatibility. When you do succeed, you can rack up long combos and the game is satisfying, but not satisfying enough to offset the frustration of missed shots and unnecessary deaths.

With some tweaks and much-needed maintenance on the app and its compatibility with the current version of the iPhone, Smell Shooter could be a pleasant distraction. But in its current state it lacks quite a few features, is frustratingly unresponsive, and you will find yourself needing to pay real world money in a matter of minutes to continue. We cannot recommend Smell Shooter in its current state.