Challenge Speedball – Review
Paintball is a pastime that many people will know or have heard about. It’s often described as a perfect team-building activity or something to do amongst friends. Speedball on other hand is a more competitive-oriented sport that mixes fast matches with small play areas. Challenge Speedball is a game that tries to capture the essence of the hobby but suffers from a dead player base and no content to back it up.
Story
Challenge Speedball is a game that is solely played online against other players. Therefore there is zero story value or lore present inside the game. You just customize your playing field and your character and that’s it. It is hard to put a story inside a game that is just about shooting other people with paint pellets, yet a campaign mode where you work your way up into the pro leagues would have been nice.
Graphics
This game looks like something quickly put together in Unity. Overall the graphics are pretty simple and you won’t need a strong computer to run it. The animations are rather basic, making the game look and feel like something that came out fifteen years ago. However, there is some creative freedom in the game because you can adjust the color of your character and upload pictures for your jersey and the billboards that are scattered on the field.
Sound
Playing Challenge Speedball is a pretty mute experience. There is no music playing at any given time and the only things you hear are a generic audience that blurts out random cheers. The game also uses pretty stale sound effects for the walking and shooting, but at least it sounds like you are firing a paintball gun.
Gameplay
Challenge Speedball is a shooter game where the goal is to mark your opponents by tagging them with a paint pellet. In matches, it puts two teams against each other and the last team standing wins. Sadly due to the game being heavily oriented towards online play, it means that single-player possibilities are rather scarce. You could always practice against bots, but they barely work, get stuck and spray the living crap out of you. If you feel creative, then you could always design your own playing field with a handful of building pieces at your disposal. The playing field is split in half and the parts will be mirrored when placing, making it that each team has their identical set up so there cannot be an unfair advantage.
As mentioned above, you can add your own custom assets into the game, such as a billboard and a nice picture on your team jersey. It is something small but could be ideal if you want to make the experience against the bots at least a bit fun. You can even adjust the color of your balls, painting the town black or bright pink, so you can see where you are aiming at. There is both a third-person view and a first-person view but the shooting doesn’t change between the two. The paintball markers are pretty accurate, only slightly deviating from the trajectory at the end. This means that only if you shoot from the other side of the map, you will have a bad time.
Controlling the game is as easy as playing any old shooter. You just move around, aim, shoot and jump. Strangely enough, you can reload your weapon, yet it never seems to run out nor do you have an indicator with how many reloads you have left.
All jokes aside, this could become a decent game if it was released for free and the community would grow strong, making for some simple and quick gameplay against other people. Sadly, during the whole time of our testing period, we never found even one server online and while hosting, nobody would join. This feels like a missed opportunity, because paintball games are something you don’t encounter every day.
Conclusion
As far as the game currently goes, it is a dumpster fire. The developers will need to fix either the empty servers by adding some properly programmed bots or make the game F2P so the community can grow. The simple sounds and graphics will mean that this will run smoothly on any system, yet it isn’t too spectacular if you enjoy your visuals. Overall the game tries to enter a niche market, but fails to do so, which is actually a shame.
Challenge Speedball – Review,
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