The development team, GameHunters, and Publisher, PlayWay, have teamed up to bring all the gun-loving maniacs a game where we can repair, rebuild, and shoot our favorite firearms. Anyone into firearms will see some popular brands like Colt, Remington, and Winchester, to name a few.

An email from your grandfather reveals that he is stepping away from gunsmithing and is leaving it all to you – a generous gesture for the amount of money he would have spent on the machinery alone. This same PC is where you’ll spend the most money, but it’s also where you’ll earn a fair chunk of the change, as this is where you need to accept incoming jobs. You also use the PC to get any parts you might need – things like barrels, stocks, firing pins, etc, but I ended up spending too much time at the Auction House. Jumping in and seeing an M4 that needed to be rebuilt at a dirt-cheap price made it too hard not to place a bid, and I ended up having an all-out bidding war with the game.

You need to make sure you are doing as many jobs as possible so that you can unlock Perks which can be anything from receiving percentage discounts from the store to unlocking the machinery around the workshop, the latter making the working time shorter and more efficient.

If you smash out enough jobs, you can unlock a weapon’s Mastery, making it easier to diagnose and fix the issues, although most of the time, the email tells you what is wrong with the weapon. Being able to accept a job and walk over to my pallet racking, pull the gun box out, and then pull the firearm out of the box was so much fun and was a title that drew me in thanks to my love of firearms.

Your grandfather left the shop pretty well equipped before he handed the business to you, but this does not mean much in the beginning – you need to unlock certain areas within the Perks menu.

You have access to the basic areas like the assembly and disassembly areas and the cleaning area, but once you get some more contracts completed, you will unlock more perk points to unlock areas like the CNC Machine and the Blueing machine, with the CNC letting you make certain components on the weapons without needing to spend your hard-earned cash, and Blueing machine used to treat a firearm with a solution that will turn red oxide or rust into black iron oxide that creates a thin protective layer on the gun to avoid scratches to major components like your barrel. The shop has a small country feel to it which I absolutely loved, and everything was so neatly placed with its own little location.

The Firing Range is used to test the firearms you have just rebuilt from the ground up. I was surprised by the number of activities you could take part in here, and they kept you busy and enthralled. I might have put a few more rounds than necessary through the weapons on the majority of the firearms just for the sheer fun of it. The first area in the range focuses on target-related mini-games, like how fast you can shoot multiple targets. There is also the option of using the clay pigeon Plate Thrower, and just like the real thing, it flings the target in a 45-degree arc while tilting forward and back, making it quite the challenge to hit.

Lastly, the final area is dedicated to close-quarter combat. If you played games like Modern Warfare, you would remember the first mission where you were time trialed in a close-quarter combat arena, running through the rooms and shooting targets. I feel this was added to be more of a fun thing and not necessarily needed. It would be cool if they added a global leaderboard to this so you could compete with online players to compete for the fastest time without a miss fire, but it was still fun running through this area with pistols and assault rifles.

The game is heavily reliant on clicking when you’re assembling and disassembling the firearms, but you’ll also use keyboard hotkeys to pan the camera around or rotate it to where you can undo a screw to remove a particular item from the firearm. There are some simulation games where the camera feels clunky, but this was not the case with Gunsmith Simulator.

There are options at the bottom of the screen if you wanted to utilize something like the “Auto Zoom” feature which I turned off quickly as it was more annoying than anything. Even shooting the guns was awesome, and much like 99.9% of shooting games on the PC, you use the mouse to shoot, and you’ll be prompted as to what button you need to use for things like reloading or turning accessories on and off.

The realism in this title was so much more than I expected. Normally, with games involving firearms, the graphics aren’t there, or they’re focused on other items like the tags or graphics you can add to them, but not with this game. Every single firearm had plenty of detail, including the finer defined details such as the individual grains on the wooden stocks. Everything from the detail and defects in the metal to how the magazine looked left me really surprised, which, being the main focus of the game, made the immersion that much better.

The environmental graphics were also well-textured and fine-tuned, and you could almost mistake it for being a CGI movie. The one thing that let the graphics down a little was the textures and models at the firing range and how the environment behaved, such as the wind blowing the trees but they didn’t seem to move.

The firing range was a big enough part of this title that it could have used a little bit more love. I’m not saying it looked unfinished, but with everything else looking amazing, it lowered the immersion a little.

Another thing that really surprised me was the audio, with the first thing you hear is the radio smashing out some tunes in the workshop, and this can be adjusted to Pop or Rock. I ended up having rock playing, which was just instrumental with electric guitars, bass, and drums, whereas pop had a more electric feel to it, and it didn’t feel right while pulling apart a Colt Pistol. The main attraction to the game is the firearms, and the developers did not disappoint in this aspect of the game.

The guns sound absolutely amazing, and it would be close to the first time I’ve heard realistic-sounding guns in a game. Everything down to how the guns behaved and sounded was perfect. It was eerily quiet while playing around at the Firing Range, and it would have been nice to hear the wind rustling through trees or some birds chirping in the background, but when you are mag dumping an M4 Assault Rifle, the birds aren’t going to hang around for too long.

If you love firearms, Gunsmith Simulator has been created for you. The disassembly and reassembly of firearms were simple and actually taught me a lot about a few things, and getting onto the range and putting some rounds through a firearm you have just rebuilt from the chassis up is very rewarding.

Written by: Hayden Nelson