GAMES REVIEW – Regular Show: Paint Wars

I’ve never had so much trouble just starting up a game. Paint Wars is completely region locked to the US, and my Mac (which I use to play all of the games I review) wasn’t playing nice. But I finally got the game to work using… totally legitimate means, and I gotta say it was pretty underwhelming.

Once again, no contextual story, you are a soldier in a paint water balloon war between team Skips (Red), Benson (Blue), and Pops (Green). After being placed randomly on a team you start the game and you have the choice between 20 stages, between 4 game types. Paint ‘Em All, your classic death match game, just shoot and take out your opponents to rack up your score. Target Painting, run about the stage hitting all the targets that you can, double the points if you can protect the target from being hit during an allotted amount of time. Underpants Capture, the same general principal as Target Painting, run around the stage capturing flagpoles with underpants on them. Lastly Dog Tags, basically the same as Paint ‘Em Up but you must collect the dog tags that appear once a player is killed.

Each game has 5 different stages, none of them too different from one another but different enough to avoid being repetitive. As for controls, its standard arrow key movement and aiming alongside ‘Z’ to shoot and ‘X’ to lob a paint grenade. Just a side note, the grenade is practically useless; you literally have to lob it as slowly as possible in an arcing motion. By the time you throw the grenade your target has already run away and started shooting you. Although the grenade is a one hit kill, so to avoid making it over powered they made the controls for it unwieldy and annoying. Plus you run out of grenades pretty easy, but you can buy new grenades, long shots, super shots and energy in the store for the coins you earn in game. All the other upgrades in which make you immensely overpowered. Oops.

On the actual shooting and running aspect of the controls it actually works very well. The pace of play is fast enough that it isn’t dull, and it’s slow enough so everyone can’t just outrun all the shots fired. They even added a cover mechanic where if you have your character push up against cover they’ll actually take cover behind it. That’s a cool little mechanic and cunningly snuck in and tutorialized through game play.

The only other aspect of the game worth mentioning is the Meta game. To summarize, whatever team you’re on you play the games and your scores are recorded and added into the overall total for your team. The team with the highest score on each level claims that area shown by the small colored flags and at the end of the seven-day period the scores are tallied and the team with the most flags wins. What do the winners get? Not sure couldn’t be bothered to find out. The problem with the Meta game that it doesn’t give me a reason to want to play it except “YOU CAN HAZ THE HIGHEST SCOREZ.” Personally that doesn’t fly, and there’s not really a sense of community with this Meta game as all you can see are just numbers climbing. For those who like these Meta numbers games then this is for you.

There’s really not a lot to talk about the game. At its most basic, it’s a fun little time waster for 15 minutes but it doesn’t have much staying power beyond that. The Meta game is under explained and completely ignorable, the upgrades and weapons other than your basic gun is either unwieldy or over powered, and… hmm… that’s it. It’s just this simple, if you think this sounds fun then you’ll like it, and if it doesn’t you won’t.