SPLAT Magazine Renegade Paintball (Xbox)

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foultzy

SPLAT Magazine Renegade Paintball (Xbox)

Postby foultzy » July 7th, 2011, 4:05 pm

[SPLAT Magazine Renegade Paintball - Global Star - 2005 - D]

Let's be blunt: there's never been a great video game about paintball. Old or new, they all pretty much suck, and the only "exception" to the rule is the one that sucks less. But SPLAT looked fairly promising to me for some reason so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately for paintball fans, it still won't be giving them the truly worthwhile virtual paintball experience they've been looking for for years.

Despite the flair of its pretty cover art, SPLAT doesn't have any flair. In fact, it pretty much screams budget. After starting off on the wrong foot with an awful intro video, basically your only real option is to set up a skirmish, considering SPLAT's "single-player tournament" is essentially a series of skirmishes with random presets. There's deathmatch, team elimination, CTF, and all that good stuff, along with 13 or so indoor and outdoor environments to play in, and while it all sounds good so far, many issues prevent these potential winners from being truly fun.

For instance, "difficulty" in this game basically translates to your level of frustration. Easy is the only one I can stand playing on, because while it's not that hard to take out all 7 guys in a team elimination match, at least it's not frustrating like higher difficulties. By Normal, they all of a sudden become braindead sharpshooters, who can take around 2-3 seconds to notice you're there but turn around and snipe you on the first shot. And while they can pinpoint you rather well, sometimes it's pretty damn difficult for you to pull off the same shots due to your markers being overly inaccurate. There's a flood of other specific issues too, like AI sometimes vegetating in a corner, going prone in a spot they can't even shoot from, or in team elimination how the entire AI ignores the rest of the map to rush at the other team in a single file line.

And the rest doesn't fares much better. While some environments look okay, one particular map has some of the worst draw-in issues I've ever seen (trees pop in directly in front of you) and apparently the level designer has no idea that the fog effect is supposed to go ABOVE the map, not in the middle of it where you see how fake it is. Models are boring and the animation is about as graceful as your typical party girl on a Saturday night. The sound features some incredibly non-threatening "woosh"-ing sounds of passing paintballs along with a few tired guitar tracks to round it out. Even with the surprising inclusion of a cover system, gunplay, as you can imagine, is still about as dull as they come.

If there is one really good thing about SPLAT, it could be its multiplayer. Taking out the game's AI eliminates a huge list of its issues and as a result, instantly makes for a far better experience. The only problem with this is that none of your friends are coming over to play SPLAT with you. Its other saving grace is its surprisingly robust field editor which was refreshing to see, even though you have to keep in mind that you're still only designing for SPLAT. So no, SPLAT doesn't do everything wrong, in fact, it can even provide random bursts of retarded fun sometimes. But unfortunately it can't prove its worth on a console flooded with so many exceptional shooters, nor can it be the first game to finally do the paintball genre some justice.

Adamant1
Posts: 2088
Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm

SPLAT Magazine Renegade Paintball (Xbox)

Postby Adamant1 » July 7th, 2011, 7:31 pm

I never got the point of paintball video games. I mean, I understand the appeal of paintball, it's a game where you pretend you're running around shooting each other - but there are already video games where you do that. Why would you play a game where you pretend to play another game where you're pretending to do something you can't do in real life?


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