Posted in: Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: game review, Xfield Paintbal SAS, XField Paintball 3

A Lesson In Futility: We Review 'XField Paintball 3'

Published Fri, 09 Jun 2017 12:45:12 -0500

Paintball in real life is fun, except for the welts you have to explain to whoever you're sleeping with. Paintball in video games… that's a tricky subject. Turning the real-life activity into a game has been a stretch for a lot of developers over the years and we can't seem to understand why. You're simply building a first-person shooter where the opponent is eliminated when they're hit by a paintball. How hard is this to make? Turns out it's pretty difficult as we discovered with Xfield Paintball 3.

The game is pretty simple as you set up a team of five players to go around a selected course and do battle against an opposing team. You pick routes for players to take or for AI's to follow as they shoot anything that moves in an attempt to be the last team standing. You decide how the players run, call out and keep a vigilant eye over the field of play, much like you would do in a battle simulator, while you control your own character in the first-person mode when the game kicks in.

Right out of the gate, Xfield Paintball 3 has a ton of clipping and failed graphics issues that make it hard to get around the course in a steady motion. Often times you'll get stuck on objects that you should be able to pass by very easily, but instead, you're snagged on them as if you hit an imaginary fishing hook and are being reeled in. Next is the sound, which goes from having zero music and little sound effects to nothing but the patter of the paintball guns being fired rapidly.

When someone is eliminated, they simply vanish with no animation of them leaving the field of play. When your paintballs fire off, there's no dispersal of paint when they hit other objects. When you get eliminated you simply wait for everything to end. The Ais will often run into each other and trip over nothing, leaving them vulnerable to hits as they're now stuck in an animation that isn't firing the gun. Everything about this game screams early access, but it's been fully published with all the flaws attached.

Xfield Paintball 3 was just atrocious—this is not a $30, this is a $5 game that should be sitting in early access until they fix all the issues attached to it. I can't in any good conscious recommend this game to anyone until it gets fixed and is given a proper update, not even paintball fans should look into it.

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