I'm quite partial to rail shooters and shooting gallery games. "Desolate" is one of those games that I really want to like but can't recommend.

First off, the game has problems running smoothly. (My computer is about four years old and running Windows 8, but this game doesn't seem so graphically intensive that it should me any trouble.) Whenever you shoot an enemy (excepting bosses), the game freezes or lags for a second or so. It doesn't affect your cursor movement but affects everything else. Sometimes your shots register during that freeze and sometimes not--it's hard to tell whether you've hit an enemy unless the enemy dies, so often you'll think you killed an enemy during that, but when the game moves normally again you find out you didn't. There is no options menu, no way to tweak graphical settings and try and fix this problem.

Even without that problem, the game is just too bare-bones. Whenever you finish shooting a wave of enemies, your character walks to a new place (which looks good and kind of does invoke the old arcade rail shooters). There's no interaction until your character reaches the next spot to fight enemies "Time Crisis" kind of did that, but "Desolate" doesn't make it work. Each battle a static screen with two or three hotspots. One of three different sprites will pop up in each hotspot and not move. You shoot them before they shoot you, and another promptly pops up in the same place. Repeat this ten or fifteen times, and then your character moves on to a new location. I made it to stage 4 out of 9, and other than boss fights, that seems to be all the gameplay there is.

The environments look pretty nice, but the few enemies are basic and repetetive. There is a story, but this is a genre that stands on gameplay, not story. I know this is a tiny and ambitious development team creating a budget title. I don't mean to be harsh on them. Sadly, there just isn't enough variation or excitement in the gameplay; if you take away the 3D envireonment, there isn't anything here you couldn't find in an old flash or DOS shooting gallery game.

Even when it's on sale, most gamers hwo aren't die-hard genre fans would probably do better to skip this one. While my review might be different if the technical issues were fixed, I would still have strong reservations.