Remington Top Shot is the sort of game you'd expect to find in the arcade, if only because shooting simulations are 
generally more rewarding if you actually have a gone to shoot rather than a mouse to move. Even so, Top Shot is shooting simulation with plenty of detail, depth, and accuracy.
The object of Top Shot is to attain a rank of 5 by gaining points from placing in the top 3 of several events. These include shooting at paper targets, skeet shooting, or real-life simulation shooting. You have access to over twenty guns which you can change whenever you'd like. Use a shotgun for skeet shooting and get a kick out of wasting virtual enemies with a Russian AK-74. The wide range of firepower is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game, although the difference from one rifle to another aren't as noticeable as one might think. Along with every gun is a handful of specs on it, although a brief history to go along with each firearm would have been both more interesting and educational.
Playing Top Shot is as easy as pointing and clicking. You control the gun from a first person perspective and by using the mouse you must overcome the natural swaying of the gun to hit your target. This realistic touch is adequately reproduced, and you can even choose to hold your breath to stabilize the gun even more so, although during the seconds following you're gun will sway wildly as you take deep breaths.
This point and click (or bend and click if you're using a joystick) approach is surprisingly more entertaining and captivating than one might think, and represents a huge step up from other shooting simulations such as Deer Hunter. Very fine and precise movements are required, though, which rules out playing the game with a trackball or trackpad while a well cleaned mouse on a quality mouse pad are essential. Version 1.2 of Top Shot, a free update for users of earlier versions, did introduce a "Mouse Speed" option for setting the sensitivity of your mouse and while it certainly helps, if you play the game any length of time you'll most likely end up straining your wrist as a result of the firm yet subtle movements.
The difficulty of playing a game such as Top Shot with a mouse or joystick is quickly realized by the absurdly high scores that one must achieve to even place in the top 3 of most events, let alone first. A nice touch to the scoring procedure is that high scores carry over from player to player, so you could bump the ranking of another player down by beating their score.
Remington Top Shot is a well designed game with plenty of interesting, entertaining, and realistic aspects. It suffers from the general problem that plagues all games of it genre, though: a mouse simply isn't an alternative for replicating the experience of firing a gun.
