The escapades of Namco's Dr. Dan and Dr. Don continue in Point Blank 3, the third edition of the irreverent, mini-game based light-gun series. A selection of 80 events are offered, many of which thrust the hapless duo into situations that require timely intervention by the player on their behalf, testing your reflexes and shooting accuracy at the same time. The myriad of events present the player with basic tasks that range in both scope and difficulty. A plethora of mini-game formats are provided that include shooting color-coded targets to protecting the two numbskulls from threatening objects, to those that require the player to perform rudimentary mathematics calculations before shooting the correct answer. Cameo appearances by Tekken characters, classic Namco franchises and other such in-jokes abound in the many scenarios players will find themselves embroiled.
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Going back to the well a third time does sort of run it dry a little bit. There's only so many variants of the same exact minigames I can play before the whole deal stops being novel. Point Blank 3 is still really good and worth playing, but it leaves me wondering if there wasn't more that could have been done with the format. More and more different games to run. Did we need a twentieth version of the "shoot the criminals, avoid the civilians" minigame, for instance? Could there have been room to explore minigames that explore the gun controller in contexts that aren't shooting? Could they have gone bigger, wackier, crazier and broken free of the constrains of a carnival shooting game that so tarp all three of these games?
I don't know. Ultimately I feel like the PB series was trapped by being arcade games. There's only so many kinds of minigames you can come up with if you still ultimately need to build toward a high score board. In a different, better world maybe we could have gotten a sequel on a home console that, free of that arcade high score constraint, could have explored wackier ideas. There's room for a Point Blank-type game to have become something like a true WarioWare type—the gun itself used as more of an abstract input much like button presses in WW.
Point Blank 3 is a fine arcade game, as fine as the rest of the series. But running the same structure three times in a row highlights its limitations. On playing the third, I can't help but think if there wasn't more they could have done with this concept. But, hey, "Point Blank, But A Little Different... Again" is good enough.