Arcade Tactical Simulation

Sometimes a shooter just needs to provide you with a bit of target practice, because a complex story and a big world are not always required components. In essence, pressing the trigger is the most rewarding bit of most shooters, so it’s easy to see why it would be nicer to have just that every now and again. However, the experience has to be fun, otherwise the action gets too repetitive.

Shooters don’t get any simpler than Arcade Tactical Simulation, given the fact that all you have to do is aim for the targets and shoot in order to receive points. There are no missions and no goals other than that, which means that you find out pretty much everything there is to know about the game from the first few minutes. Unfortunately, that’s not a very good thing in this case.

The simplicity would be welcomed in other conditions, but in this case the developers did not even take the time to make the gameplay fun. In fact, it’s anything but that, especially when it comes to the aiming system. Thus, there’s no way to move the camera vertically, and the levels are very repetitive and mostly empty.

The points you gain over the course of the levels can be used to unlock more weapons from the main menu, such as assault rifles, or even snipers. It depends on what you are most comfortable with, but be wary that the differences between weapons are barely noticeable. The points can also be used to unlock extra levels, although the color theme is the only difference between them in most cases.

The graphics are about as basic as they can get as well, since they actually look hand-drawn using the mouse. They wouldn’t matter too much of the gameplay was a bit more enjoyable, but that is not really the case here. The fact that you can only move the crosshair on a fixed horizontal line is the most annoying fact about the game, making your actual aiming skills useless.

All things considered, Arcade Tactical Simulation does not feature any kind of enjoyable features, regardless of how experienced or inexperienced you are in the genre. Thus, there are much better shooters out there you can waste your time with instead.