Reviews

PaintBall 2

July 18, 2005

PaintBall 2, Main Menu

I first reviewed PaintBall in April of 2004, during CrazySoft Week here on the site. It was my favorite application of the week, and earned a rare “Perfect 10” award as well. Now it’s just over a year later and there’s a new PaintBall in town, version 2. It improves in many ways over the original, offering some new gameplay modes and even more addictive gameplay.

Easy: Great for beginners; this mode simply requires you to make groups of three or more paintballs of the same color next to an open pipe.

Hard: Similar to easy mode, except that your paint reserve is constantly dripping. You have to quickly make groups of three or more paintballs to replenish your supply.

Panic Mode: You have 100 seconds to get as high a score as possible. Watch out, because the paint reserve is dripping and when you run out of paint, it’s game over. Fortunately there aren’t any black balls in this mode, so it’s a little easier to keep up the frenetic pace.

Heat: Only groups of three or more paint balls of the same color that are next to a “hot” red pipe are sucked out of the playing area, so you have to plan carefully.

Chroma: This mode is fiendishly difficult, since you have to carefully mix colors according to the color wheel.

Multiplayer: Play against your friends wirelessly using Bluetooth

There are several different bonuses that you can earn, regardless of which gameplay mode you’re using. You get extra points for using paint balls while they’re “wiggling” on the playing field, but you have to be fast. You can also spell out the word “PaintBall” by making groups of three or more with specially marked balls. Spell out the whole word before your game ends and you’ll get a 20,000 point bonus, which is a great way to ensure that you see your name at the top of the online high score table at the CrazySoft web site. Finally, in Easy and Hard modes, using the same pipe repeatedly causes it to “heat up” gradually, which can also add to your score.

There’s also a very nice variety of preference options available in the game. If you have a Tapwave Zodiac you can use the joystick to control the game instead of a stylus, and you can also optionally enable vibration to give your gameplay an extra “buzz” of excitement. You can also choose whether or not you want tips to pop up when you select a gameplay mode, and whether or not you want to enable stereo sound on supported devices. You can control the game speed as well, choosing between normal, fast, and fastest, but my favorite option is the ball style. You can choose Shiny (the default mode), Moon, or Rock. They don’t change any of the gameplay modes or rules, but it is nice to be able to customize a bit of how the game looks. It also seemed that the Rock style made it a bit easier for me to distinguish the red and orange balls from each other, and you might find that you have a similar favorite.

As before, the graphics are truly amazing, and the sound effects are just perfect. I still love the sound that the game makes when the paint ball groups are sucked back up into the pipe. PaintBall 2 is one of those games to which you can quickly find yourself hopelessly addicted, but you’ll also keep coming to it again and again, trying to improve upon your high score each time. Paint Ball 2 is normally $16.95, but through July 29 you can get it for just $12.95 at the CrazySoft web site.