Paintball fans looking for a video game representation of their favorite sport on the PC are in for some disappointment. Some of the better games, like the Greg Hastings' series, are nowhere to be found, and the current crop of games on the platform are pretty horrid. XField Paintball 3 is an attempt to bring the successful mobile series to the PC platform, but the title just isn't ready for the limelight.

XField Paintball 3 comes with two modes that, in a way, conflict heavily with one another. Walk in the Park lets you do just that, as you can take a practice tour through five different stages. There's no AI to play against, but you can get a feel for the guns' firing speed and arc, and you can practice laying out tactics for your five-man team. That means planning their routes and giving them roles, so they can control the field.

When you practice tactics, you can't tell if the planned routes will actually turn out to be useful, and the big gripe is that all of the stages are exactly the same. No matter which stage you pick, the layouts of the obstacles are exactly the same, so you're only changing out the surroundings. Even then, two of those backdrops are also exactly the same, so there are really only four stages to train in at all times.

The second mode is Quick Play, which is meant to take you online. The only mode available here is 2v2, so that immediately makes Walk in the Park's team tactics rather useless. The game gives you no options for character customization, and despite the number of licensed manufacturers shown, you can't change gear at all, so that seems like a wasted opportunity.

Truth be told, XField Paintball 3 feels like a game that should still have the Steam Early Access label. The trailer promised larger battlegrounds, but nothing in the training mode suggests that such a thing exists. Go into the training videos, and you'll see the use of techniques and tricks that just don't exist in the game. Look at the leaderboards, and you'll find developers and QA populating most of the slots. Nothing feels like it was ready for public consumption.

Of course, the biggest knock against the game is the lack of an online community. We've waited for a solid hour for anyone to show up in a match, and not one person appeared. Despite being out for two months already, the game has no one playing online. Without an option for bots to fill the slots and with none of the other basic features one would expect from an online game nowadays, this feels like a game to have just to fill up space on a drive.

Even if you don't factor in that the game comes with no graphical options whatsoever, something that is almost unforgivable in the PC space, the overall appearance is sterile at best. The ads in the Times Square level may look clean, but the geometry everywhere else lacks any flair. The animations for simple things, like trigger pulls, look plain, and the reloading of your gun is completely awkward. As for the sound, the effects are fine, but the music is absolutely terrible. That especially applies to the rap song in the London training level, which is possibly one of the worst ever heard in a video game to date.

It's difficult to recommend XField Paintball 3 when most of it just isn't ready for prime time. The training mode only gives you an empty map so you can get the lay of the land, but it's nowhere close to what's represented in video footage. The online mode is barren, and without any offline modes or bots to work with, the title becomes a virtual paperweight. Unless an online community appears soon, it'll be easy to forget that this game exists.

Score: 3.0/10