The game itself is a first person shoot ‘em up. It surprised me in many ways as being much more advanced than I had expected. The 3D rendering, map sizes and designs rival those of early millenium top-end development releases of the same genre, which, in my opinion, is already a triumph for a free online based and hosted game.

I was also impressed by the loading time, I was expecting to have to download a series of random plug-ins and watch a progress bar for the next 30 minutes, but even this ‘hunk of junk’ desktop of mine was in-game within 3 minutes.

All this mechanical and technical effort is let down slightly be some actual game play issues. The rather strange avatars leave something to be desired and I found it difficult to differentiate between friendlies and enemies at a glance.

The absolute, most important aspect of an FPS, for me, is the hitbox activity, which unfortunately seemed almost non existent. I mean, every time I actually managed to hit another player, I would decrease their health by the same value where ever the shot landed (apart from maybe the head, its quite difficult to tell where you hit). On another occasion I wasted several shots trying to ‘pwn’ this ‘n00b’ that was running away from me, despite my cross-hair landing perfectly in the guy’s back for at least 10 shots, I failed every attempt. Years of gaming experience would suggest to try shooting slightly ahead of the character to account for ‘bullet time’ but this too was without success. Truth is, I just couldn’t work out (bearing in mind I only had the chance to play for a short while) where, how and what affects the hit-boxes. But hey, its not like its trying to be Call of Duty or CS:S is it.

Overall, 3D Paradise Paintball is years ahead of it’s ‘Flash’ game competition and will only improve on their next project. I have every confidence that the Cmune team will be big news in years to come. Good job guys.

3D Paradise Paintball