Review

World Championship Paintball

So maybe some sports just don’t translate well into games….

Honestly, I can’t say I really believe that, but it would be a good excuse for this game. Paintball seems like it would be an awesome sport—like laser tag, only more painful. Unfortunately, World Championship Paintball drained the fun out of this game like a half-starved vampire drains the blood out of some ignorant sap. There are just so many problems; it’s hard to know where to start.

One problem that comes to mind is in the game description it’s self. “Unprecedented depth and paintball realism”? Really? Is paintball this bad? Have I been fooling myself for years when I thought of how awesome it would be to go out and rain down paint fire on unsuspecting targets? No, no, either paintball just really sucks, or the game didn’t stick close enough to actual paintball, or it stuck too close. It’s not likely the first choice.

I’m betting that it’s the last option; they stuck too close to paintball. It’s great that the developers made the game so close to the real deal, but it does them no good when they’re trying to make a good game. Movies and games have a common thread when it comes to emulating reality: exaggeration. You can’t feed this game to gamers as paintball really is. If they wanted to play a game as close to paintball as possible, then they would go and play paintball. Anyone who plays this is looking for a really good game that is based, perhaps heavily, on the sport. But first they’re looking for a good game. This game could have done with a bit of faking it. The developers needed to use more artistic license to tweak the game outside of the reality of paintball. No one wants actual paintball if they’re playing the game; they want extreme, rock-your-socks paintball that blows actual paintball out of the water. If the point in its realism was to be a nod to paintball, then a better homage would have been to make an awesome paintball game, even at the risk of downplaying some elements and amping up others. (Editor’s note: this doesn’t hold true to other sports as being realistic in those games, help them to be fun experiences.)

Most of the individual elements of the game are only mediocre at best. The gameplay feels tedious and gets tiresome rather quickly. The aiming is rather frustrating because the controls feel overly sensitive. This led me to think that the shooting must be super accurate, with the controls being so sensitive and all, but, alas, this is not the case. In fact this is a big part of why this game is so difficult to play. Granted, different guns have different range and accuracy statistics, but even when targets were well within the range of even a peashooter, the shot managed not to connect.

And your teammates, they will be a constant cause of frustration. Either the opposing team’s AI just far outstrips your team at most turns, or your team is just dumb as wet rocks. I’m going to guess the second one here. Seriously, if you’re playing four-person teams, within the first twenty seconds you could be all by yourself. Can we say cover, people? Actually, I take that back, your team does know how to take cover. The problem is they’ll now and then take your cover, booting you out of the spot and leaving you as a sitting duck to be picked off.

Now, in the case of the graphics, they can be described as nothing short of ho-hum. The characters are textured, so that’s a plus, but the textures are nothing to write home about. The environments themselves are pretty boring as well. I suppose you wouldn’t want a paintball arena to have eye-popping bright colors since the point is to be discrete while you hide and pick off your opponents, but something could be done to give the game as a whole a better aesthetic sense. The load screen is another problem. The load progress bar manages to get to a certain point at about three-fourths of the way and disappear. Then it flickers on and off as it loads the final, excruciating part of the bar. This would not be half so frustrating if it wasn’t for the fact that each level takes irritatingly long time to load. I know this doesn’t break the game, however, the fact that the load bar disappears only to flicker annoying in your face adds to the frustration of having to wait such a long time between loads.

The sound was disappointing as well. The intro screen with the start menu had a nice track, so the game itself would likely have some of the same kind of music. This, unfortunately, was not the case. The only time you hear any kind of a soundtrack is when you’re on the menu screens. This was somewhat baffling. The in-game sounds were nothing but paintball fire, running steps, calls from your teammates or the other team, and environment sounds (if you’re playing in an outside arena). It makes sense that having a blaring music track slapped over top of the level could mess up the player as they’re trying to sneak up on opponents, but this is not valid enough reasoning for not having a better in-game soundtrack. If not a low-played music track, then you can never go too wrong with more ambient sound, anything to make the arenas less boring.

In its defense, customizing your team could make some of the problems with your team intelligence less evident, but you’ve got to win to get money for things like strategizing, accuracy, etc. And if you take a look at your team’s initial stats, everything starts to make a little more sense. There are some points in the game where you will start to have fun, but somewhere along the way one of the game’s faults always seems to get in the way and you go back to being frustrated again.