Astraware recently released Police Range for the Windows Phone (touchscreen only). We had the opportunity to take it out for a test drive and found it to be an entertaining, somewhat addictive game.
As you would imagine, Police Range puts you on the firing line of a target range. The Windows Phone app offers two game modes, target practice and crime alley. You "shoot" your targets simply by tapping on them.
Target practice is a more traditional target range where you test your marksmanship against silhouette targets. Each level requires a certain number of targets to be hit to move you to the next level. The higher the level, the more targets are required to move on. As you hit more targets in a row, the impact increases to the point your target explodes with each hit in a strangely entertaining manner.
Crime Alley puts you in a street setting where a variety of targets appear in windows, doorways, behind crates and other "real life" items. Targets are a mix of bad guys and good guys. The goal is to only shoot the bad guys. As with the Target Practice mode, you move on to higher levels by hitting a pre-determined number of targets.
At the end of each stage, Police Range provides you with an efficiency report on the number of targets hit, missed and other accuracy percentages. Graphically, Police Range is very nice. The muscle bound shooter in the tank top takes a little getting used to (kept reminding me of Rambo with short hair) but the targets and animation is spot on. In playing Police Range I did not experience any glitches, crashes or other bugs.
Police Range is addictive and I often found it hard to put the game down. The early stages are on the easy side but once you move up the ranks, the speed picks up as does the overall challenge. One nice feature is that your progress is automatically saved if you have to leave the game for a phone call or nagging wife.
The only nit I could find is that you can't return to the main menu from the scoring screen. You have to enter the next stage and tap pause which would pull up a navigation menu. It would have been nice to have a menu button on the scoring screen. Regardless, Police Range is an entertaining game and is available at Astraware for $4.99.
