Paintball Pro has a really cool promise, but it fails in its execution.
Paintball Pro is a tactical paintball simulation game that recently hit the Appstore. Now the whole genre name might get you confused cause frankly this is the first ever game of this genre. The premise is very simple, you control a team of five paintballers on a map in a top down view and all you have to do is tag everyone on the other team or capture the flag in the middle.
The controls are very intuitive as the only thing you can do is just draw a path for your selected player to follow and tap where the enemy is to fire in his direction. Everything kinda works, but it is just not fun to play. Why? Cause of the insane difficulty the game has. There are two modes, Quick Play and Tournament apart from a Training mode. In Quick Match you can set the difficulty from one to six stars and in Tournament the game sets the difficulty for you.
Now it is normal and pretty much a must for video games to have difficulty settings ranging from very easy to very hard. Well, that's not the case with Paintball Pro. One star ranges from a kinda easy to medium difficulty, but from two stars to six it ramps up in a very stupid way. Two stars is hard, three is incredibly hard and four/five/six it's just impossible to win anything. The AI is just brutal and will tag your team in a matter of seconds.
Add in the "broken" cover and shooting mechanics and you get a very poorly executed game. These mechanics just does not work. What is the point of having blocks of cover in the map when you are still vulnerable? What's more unfair is that when you are shooting from cover, you will not hit anyone since your balls will just end up hitting your cover?! It is really unfair and will definitely ruin your experience.
I really liked the description of the game when I first read it, that's why I asked the devs for a promo code. And I was really disappointed that it didn't live to its full potential. Maybe if the game was not on real time, but was kinda turn based like in a XCOM fashion it would have been great. That would really work cause the game already has a stats and perks system running in the background for your paintballers, but at the moment it is kinda useless.
Presentation wise the game fares OK. It has a grungy-punk-cartoony artstyle that looks good, even though kinda fuzzy around the edges of some of the graphics. The UI could have been a lot better cause I found it to be a little un-intuitive to say the least, cause it is very difficult to differentiate what is a button and what not. The music and sound effects are really well done. I especially liked the background shout outs like "Oh he got me" or "Came on man" and things like that.
Bottom Line
Paintball Pro has a really cool promise, but it fails in its execution. It is stupidly hard and not that fun or engaging to play. In the end I can't really recommend it.
