If you play first-person shooters, chances are you and your buddies also played "army" as kids. You toted plastic Uzis and water pistols around the neighborhood and argued over who shot whom. Paintball is the grown-up version of playing soldier, which instead uses CO2-powered guns that fire gelatin capsules filled with paint. Considering the worldwide popularity of paintball, you can't blame Infogrames for publishing High Impact Paintball, a first-person shooter based on the sport - but then again, if you played the game, you'll probably feel as if someone should be responsible. The game's subpar graphics and poor sound, coupled with a buggy 3D engine and tedious gameplay, will make real paintballers head for the woods; and these same elements will make first-person shooter fans quickly return to their copies of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.
The first thing you'll notice about High Impact Paintball is that there simply isn't much to it. It does feature a few different play modes like free-for-all (which is deathmatch) and capture the flag, which both work as you'd expect. Speedball mode is an elimination game, and siege lets one team try to sound an air horn in the defenders' base. These different modes seem to offer diversity, but when you get only two maps per mode, they don't. Furthermore, these outdoor maps are relatively small, square-shaped areas with some scattered trees, low fences, and junked cars for obstacles, so you really don't have much to do but occasionally duck behind a wall. Only a couple of the maps have any substantial elevation changes to add some sort of tactical depth, and there's little in the maps that creates any sense of orderly flow or purpose, let alone the feeling of being in a real environment.
The terrain graphics themselves compound the problem with the map design, since they aren't anywhere near state of the art. The hills are boxy, and they rise sharply from the ground without any sort of gradual curvature. Since textures are limited and repetitive, the ground color is unrealistically uniform. Fog effects aren't volumetric - instead, they create the impression of an overcast day, although they do that decently enough. And the 3D engine itself is buggy: Expect to get snagged on static scenery repeatedly, sometimes with no way of getting unhooked. In addition, collision detection is a big problem in High Impact Paintball - paintballs sometimes pass through objects, and players can walk through trees. The game's player models and skins are thankfully a bit more complex and lifelike than the terrain graphics, and you can choose different shades of camouflage, as well as male or female models. The animation is passable: Player movements look relatively lifelike, but players almost seem to glide across the landscape instead of run along it.
From the main menu, you can hear hard-driving guitar riffs, which give you false hope that the game's sound might make up for the graphics' mediocrity. Unfortunately, during combat, there's no optional music - only ambient birdsong that does little to make you feel as if you're actually in the woods. Since the guns are air powered, the lack of punch when you fire them is understandable; but there are no other sounds to convey excitement in their place. At times you can barely hear other players' footsteps, and when players are hit, they simply shout, "I'm hit!" The lack of excitement and tension is almost painful.
The gameplay in High Impact Paintball does nothing to pick up the slack left by the limp graphics and sound. Paintballs fly in a random trajectory with each shot and often miss their intended targets. This might be realistic, but it sure isn't fun. And there's often no visual confirmation of a hit. You only occasionally get the satisfaction of seeing a paintball hit an opponent, since the balls sometimes pass right through and splat on the ground. The fact that the computer opponents' artificial intelligence is so lacking makes matters worse. Sometimes you'll spot teammates employing sensible tactics like ducking behind cover, but you'll often see a defending team just milling around its flag. On the hardest difficulty level, the computer players' aiming abilities increase, but their tactics don't improve. To compensate, there's a multiplayer mode over the Internet or a LAN, but after repeated tries, I found only one active server that was populated solely with bots.
There's nothing wrong with giving paintball fans a computer version of their sport, nor is there anything wrong with creating a shooter that's devoid of ricocheting gibs and plumes of blood. However, it's reasonable to expect a game about small-arms combat - even a nonlethal version like paintball - to get the adrenaline pumping with quick action or mounting tension. Unfortunately, High Impact Paintball has neither.
