Thank you Trinity Project for sending us this game to review!

When it comes to shooting games, many first-person shooters are realistic to some degree, but Weapons Genius is all about the real aspects of shooting, including the making of the guns and their ballistics testing. However, the attempt it makes at being a gunsmithing simulator is a mixed bag of below-average effort at best.

Weapons Genius starts you off in a weapons smithing area of a gun range. After ordering parts for your weapon off a nearby computer, you then take them to a nearby workbench. After welding the stampings and other parts into a usable firearm, you then paint it a different color if you so desire. You can then take the gun for a test run in a nearby shooting range to test its ballistics performance.

The shooting range is a timed arena where you shoot various pop-up targets at various ranges from the shooting platform. Depending on how well you hit the targets in the allotted time, you are awarded money for your performance to buy better parts for making new weapons. Wash, rinse, and repeat until you have made the perfect firearm for your armory.

It's a simple concept and a fairly unique one for a simulation game. The overall presentation doesn't offer more at the moment, though the developer has announced plans they intend to make a DLC with far more gun crafting options, as you are generally limited to various forms of assault rifles for crafting at the time of this writing.

Graphically, it's a Unity-based game and has a notable feeling of using stock assets purchased from the Unity store. Weapon models are acceptably realistic and there are some nice touches like the welder animations for fitting the gun stampings together on the workbench, but the graphics look like a slightly blocky Playstation 2 game otherwise. Graphical effects for firing guns are also quite minimalist, which is quite disappointing if you were expecting actual real touches like muzzle flashes, detailed recoil, or expelled bullet casings and magazine changing.

The sound is also rather basic. Aside from one looping musical soundtrack that is rather annoying after the first few repeats, the shooting range has some stock gunfire noises and that's it. Given this is a game based on realism and no one gun model will sound identical due to differences in the barrel, receiver, and any equipped accessories like silencers, it's a disappointment these subtle differences are not included for immersion.

Controls aren't too hard to figure out and while the gun-making area labels what buttons to use nicely and the target range is quite easy to master if you are familiar with first-person shooters (at least with a keyboard and mouse setup), it is otherwise completely unhelpful in explaining what to do. There is no guide telling you to manually pick up the welding tool (which is not labeled as such for those who never saw one before) to weld certain parts onto a gun, just to give a good example. Other issues stem from the UI, which is only partially in English (and still has some Cyrillic characters despite offering both English and Russian), and this makes figuring out the controls even harder.

Stability is the one high note. Aside from some technical bugs with the actual gameplay, the game experience itself loads fast and runs on a very modest PC setup.

Morally, there is very little to complain about. There is the usage of guns on a target range, but it remains devoid of offensive details. The targets are the basic popup targets found in any real-world shooting range. That aside, there is nothing else of any note.

Overall, this was a disappointing execution of a great concept. It has the potential to be a great edutainment game on firearms, and the latest from the game developer announced plans to have another developer further refine the game code. Until that happens though, I can't recommend this to anyone of any age due to its bad design and poor gameplay.