Video games are supposed to be fun. But I often find them frustrating and difficult, which is how I know that they are actually a real hobby like golf. And as with golf, in order to enjoy video games, you need to practice. That’s where the free tool Aim Lab comes in. It wants to help you improve your accuracy, precision, and reaction times in various first-person shooters.
Aim Lab is available for free on Steam right now in Early Access. It debuted last year, but its development team has continuously updated it to improve its features. It recently got a login system that enables you to save an ongoing profile. This should help you track your progress over time.
And I am very interested in progressing my aim because it is bad right now.
Aim Lab gives players a number of exercises for improving different aspects of aiming with a mouse. You can work on improving your flick responses, your precision on moving targets, and your reaction times on unpredictable targets that require only minor aiming adjustments.
The program also tracks your performance to tell you how well you’re doing. It even gives you “awards” based on exactly how badly you are screwing up. I always get “slow hands” and the game makes a point of telling me that my shots are so wild that no one would refer to what I’m doing as “precision.” You can see how bad I am in the video at the top of the page.
But I want to get better.
My plan is to play through a battery of Aim Lab exercises every day for a month. I’m going to see if I can improve. And if I do, I’ll come back here and tell you all about it. And if I don’t improve, I will probably go spend too much money on better equipment — you know, just like golf.
