Greg Hastings' Paintball 2 Review

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(More customer reviews)***Before I begin, full disclosure: I'm featured as a character in this game, as my team (the Philly Paintball Group) was one of many selected to be in this game. I'll try to review this game as honestly as possible, however. I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through the game, so if the last 1/3 radically changes my opinion I'll edit the review.***
Paintball is sort of like a real-life video game, but up to this point it has not translated well to the current generation of consoles. Enter Greg Hastings' Paintball 2, the sequel to a cult hit on the original Xbox. While not one of the production quality of, say, Mass Effect 2 or Halo: Reach, the game is fundamentally sound and does a pretty good job of translating the paintball experience to a video game (as much as possible, at any rate - there really is not substitute for reality in this case).
The game features three career tracks, which can be completed concurrently and in any order: Speedball (paintball played on small fields with man-made bunkers), Woodsball (played on large fields, usually with special ojectives) and Recreational Paintball or "Recball," which is sort of a grab bag of paintball styles.
The player starts out as a protege of Greg Hastings, the game's namesake and arguably the best paintball player in the world, who proceeds to send them around the country to various tournaments. At the beginning of the game, the player forms a team from a limited selection of rookie players and low-end equipment, but each event unlocks more players and equipment and gives cash to purchase them. Unlike other games I've seen, the equipment is varied, and it makes a big difference here which qualities you pick (for example, would you sacrifice accuracy for better range, or for more shots per tank, or for a higher firing rate?).
One really nice touch about the game is that it uses reality - every single player in the game is a real-life part of a real-life team. The fields are digital reproductions of real fields, ranging from the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania to the beaches of Hawaii. You sometimes even go overseas.
As a shooter, your "missions" will always be some variant of defeating the opposing team, but GHP2 keeps it pretty fresh with about a half-dozen game types (the standard elimination and capture the flag options are included, of course) and a wide selection of maps. The speedball fields play fairly similar (for obvious reasons), but the others are varied enough to warrant different tactics.
The game does have a few issues. First and foremost, people used to playing first- or third-person shooters may find the controls awkward, as I did. Some functions usually mapped to the triggers or bumpers are instead mapped to the ABXY buttons, and vice versa, and the joystick-click functions tend to be finicky.
The game tends to be really easy at the beginning of all three tracks and then hit you - usually around the 4th or 5th event - with a severe jump in difficulty. It wouldn't normally be so frustrating, but your teammates' AI is directly linked to "skills" you purchase. These skills (or players that come pre-loaded with them) are prohibitively expensive (or, in the case of players, expensive AND scarce) in the early stages of the game. This makes passing these middle stages a sort of hit-or-miss, trial-and-error affair, at least until you can buy three or four skilled players. Also, the command system is pretty simplistic ("go to," "suppress," "defend"), but learning to use it effectively will somewhat mitigate the iffy AI.
The last Greg Hastings game had a breakout manager to plan the initial seconds of the game; I would have liked to see an evolution of that here rather than the given and limited fixed-option planner (balanced, heavy left/center/right, defensive).
The graphics aren't top-of-the-line; they resemble the higher-end original Xbox titles, but are on the middle-low range for the 360. On the plus side, this cuts load times to next to nil, and I have yet to have a hiccup of any kind in gameplay.
Achievement-wise, the game sports the standard 1000G, with a good chunk of points for beating each of the tracks and a smattering of 20-50 point awards for a few random feats. People who like earning achievements would be well-served to check out the list before playing, as some require very specific criteria.
All in all, the game is built on a great concept, but the execution is squarely average. It's fun to play, but you're always aware of the game's limits. Anyone who is a fan of paintball or is looking for a shooter not rated "M" should give this a look.

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