Paintball games on the PC don’t exactly have a glowing track record. In fact, the popular sport has given rise to some of the worst shooters ever made, games like the plodding and inane High Impact Paintball and the infamously wretched Extreme PaintBrawl. Finally someone has gotten it, well, close. Splat Magazine Renegade Paintball won’t make anyone forget the Unreal Tournament or Quake franchises, but for a straightforward budget shooter, it’s not too shabby. In fact, in short bursts, it can be pretty fun.
Renegade Paintball features two capture-the-flag variants, a king of the hill mode, standard and team deathmatch, and an arcade mode. The latter features power-ups like rapid fire, invulnerability, and a speed boost. None of these modes breaks any new ground, but it’s hard to argue with proven classics. You can play these game types online or offline in a skirmish mode that lets you choose team sizes, time limit, friendly fire, and so on. Online, there are no chat capabilities, and we experienced some connection problems and lag/warping.

There’s also a career mode, where you have to beat 28 challenges sequentially. The maps and game types regularly rotate, but quickly start to feel too similar. You can finish all the challenges in an afternoon, and there’s nothing else to the career mode: if you’re hoping to buy better equipment, manage your team, or deal with any sort of strategic challenges, you won’t find it here.
Renegade Paintball gives you thirteen reasonably diverse maps. These range from small indoor arenas filled with oversize inflatable obstacles, to a sprawling military testing ground, to a Wild West “town” with old-fashioned wooden buildings. The maps all provide plenty of cover in the form of trees, rocks, walls, natural depressions, and the like. Renegade Paintball also includes a user-friendly map editor. You can’t alter terrain, but you can easily place over 150 different types of objects like bunkers, towers, and trees.
Some of the provided maps suffer from design flaws, such as spawn points too close to the flags. This can make it too hard to grab the enemy flag since opponents keep materializing right next to it just after your teammates shoot them. Some maps are also a bit too big for a game where everyone is on foot; all the running gets tedious after a while.
Despite some overly big maps, gameplay as a whole is fast paced. There’s not much in the way of slow sneaking, but rather lots of quick run-and-gun shootouts. Nevertheless, for a bit of stealth you can crouch and go prone, as well as peek around corners. You can view the action from first- or third-person perspectives. The latter lacks a crosshair, but it mercifully lacks the giant marker (paintball gun) that obscures half the screen in the first-person view.
System Requirements:
Windows 2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 3 - 800 MHz
DirectX 9.0b
256 MB RAM
Free hard drive space: 800 MB (wont need any for this version)
3D Video Card 64MB
16-bits Sound Card