i played less than 5 minutes of this and it already sucked ass. why the HELL should you have to have a timing mini game to release your mag? WHY. releasing a mag irl IS SOMETHING YOU DO WITH THE PRESS OF A BUTTON. i can see why this is free it literally feels like mobile game slop ported over to steam.

Let me preface by saying I don't ever usually write reviews, but this game is early access and its a game that heavily appeals to me and my interests so I really want it to be good.

This game IS fun, please understand that I absolutely recommend this game for gun nuts, but it still has some serious issues that need ironing out before its full release. I'm giving this game a positive review because I enjoy it and will still continue playing it despite my gripes.

The Graphics:
Games do not need to look amazing or have high fidelity with insane realistic lighting to be good, but this game looks like it was made in the mid 2000s and not in the charming way Half Life 2 looks. The models of the firearms are taken from the game World of Guns, so guns added later into WoG's development look nice (Alien, M240, Hi-Point), while ones added earlier look pretty bad (M1897, 1911, Uzi). The lighting is simple, but it usually works fine, but flashlights look like a PNG overlay on the screen rather than an actual flashlight and lasers are quite literally a dot in the middle of your screen (that erases your crosshair too, making them straight downgrades). Menus are incredibly janky and often have jarring fonts that look like they were ripped from a middle school powerpoint presentation.

The Animations:
Similar to the graphics, the animations look a couple decades out of date. They're stiff and floaty, looking more like an animation you would see a backround NPC use rather than the main character. Changing the firemode on most firearms has the player character holding the gun up to his face, pinching the fire selector, then pushing it down to the selected firemode before shouldering the gun again (While it IS nice that there is an actual animation for this, its an incredibly long and in your face animation). Shotguns and single loading rifles never load in the right amount of rounds, your character loads 1-3 rounds in depending on how empty the gun is. This is egregious since it indicates that the game does keep track of how empty your gun is and determines the reload animation based on that, but wont go through the effort of having you load in the correct amount of cartridges. Recoil looks like the player character is poorly miming recoil by flailing his gun up and down rather than actual recoil. This is nitpicking, I know, but in a game all about realistically simulating guns its an important detail you NEED to get correct.

Handling:
Sensitivity is fine, I didn't need to adjust anything to make it work for me, I'm quite happy its nothing like the awful shooting sections in World of Guns. Recoil is all over the place though, 9x18 kicks out of a Makarov like .44 kicks out of a revolver, .30-06 out of a Garand feels like .308, 12g's recoil seems to depend on the day of the week rather than the type of shell im using. The game features a "hold your breath to steady your gun" mechanic like so many other shooters, this is fine, but the way its done is just so odd: Your aim slowly begins to sway as you aim (Yes, for EVERY gun) and once you reach around 50% steady you gain the option to hold your breath and reset the sway. You do not keep holding your breath though, it only resets the bar and it begins ticking down again. This is incredibly odd and for sections where you are aiming for longer it often results in your character gasping for air every 5 seconds as you frantically switch between looking at the targets and your steady meter. Reloading has its own mechanic, functionally a quick time event where you have to press the R key at certain highlighted sections. Either the sensitivity during this section is bugged or the highlights are placed incorrectly because often times you need to press R BEFORE the bar reaches the highlighted segment for a successful reload. Bullets go where the barrel points, not where your optic points. This is fine, except optics are rarely ever zeroed correctly, there seems to be no way to zero them too. As of right now you are better off using irons whenever possible. Bullets have travel time, but its exceptionally slow, I should not have to lead moving targets at 15 meters when shooting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ .30-06. There seems to be no bullet drop.

The Gameplay:
The gameplay is fun, its very satisfying to move around a course quickly and take out targets. However, certain targets are more annoying than others. While it could simply be poor zeroing, from my testing it also seems to be poor hitreg. Certain targets may or may not count as being hit when you shoot them, with certain targets (steel targets with health/armor and those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "enemy" robots are the worst with this). Moving around the map is fine, but crouching and crawling should definitely be reworked to function similar to other shooters rather than their current state (IE: going from crouching to crawling works fine, but then getting up from crawling has you remain crouching, or going from standing to crawling then getting up has you go to crouching first). Penalties are handed out very liberally and not just for shooting "no shoot" targets. Following the correct path can net you an out of bounds penalty because the hitbox for the correct path is smaller than the model. Certain obstacles you need to jump over require the player to be moving at max speed to clear (I'm not sure this is entirely true, some obstacles I have yet to clear even going as fast as possible). Certain targets only pop up after other targets have been cleared, but the game has a hard time making you aware of these, leading to me getting penalized from walking away from a shooting position early as I hadn't realized that a new target had popped up.

The Monetization:
Premium guns are fine, but charging for the map maker seems scummy. I haven't bought the map maker and I don't plan to. Make your own decision on this

I'll probably come back to this as I go through the game some more and come across more issues or as the devs fix issues, but these are my incoherent ramblings on the state of the game. I do have faith that a lot of these will be fixed and I hope this goes as well as World of Guns. As of right now I do recommend this game, but only if you are willing to put up with the extreme amounts of jank.