Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball Max'd (Xbox, 2005)

Max’d was published by Activision and developed by WXP Inc. who also did The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings for Xbox. This is the same team that released the first Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball last year so they know what they have to build off.

Like the first version you build a character and start a career. You are forced to play tournament after tournament. There really is no story or environment developed. You just continue to play tournaments to collect cash to use at the store. You also receive experience points that allow you to improve your characters attributes. Game play can get a little boring as your only real motivating factor on going through the tournaments is to get enough cash to buy the top of the line gear in the game’s online store. You do feel driven to continue, to do better, to finish first and win the cash. After all, that is how you are going to get the cool stuff at the store! Take away the greed factor and you find yourself playing a first person shooter that tires out pretty quickly.

There are 29 different tournaments to play with 213 fields. That does keep it somewhat fresh. There are going to be a few fields that are too big, too small or too whatever for your particular taste but with so many fields to play you will find several you like as well. Along with the new fields Max’d offers you several new paintball markers to play with as well.

You can also choose to play online with Xbox’s Live network. This was the salvation of the original GHTP (Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball) with over 100,000 Xbox players spraying paint on Live. Online play adds vibrancy to a game that can seem to dredge along at times. The human element to the game is what makes paintball so fun in the first place. On Live you will feel the adrenaline flow and the actual excitement of Max’d will come out. The same fields that are available off line are there to play on Live. There are even a few more but I will get to that in a second.

Game play is further enhanced on Max’d by adding a breakout manager. This allows you to plan your team’s first moves out of the box. You can pick where your players are going to set up after the start whistle. The control does not stop there either. During the game you can still give orders to your players as well call out where the opponents are bunkering. Team orders are given by pointing and hitting a button or by voice command if you use the Communicator Headset (not included). WXE improved the AI of the game and players act smarter by hiding and moving to improved positions though the AI is not even close to the fun of playing human opponents.

A cool thing that the folks at WXE did was to add a custom field editor. Thank you! This does help to make the game a bit more addictive. You are able to build a field for tournament play available in the exhibition or Live modes of game play. The fields are based of size (3 to choose from) and you are able to select where to put bunkers. Before you finalize your design you are able to walk through the field or get a bird’s eye view of it.

Final Thought

Max’d all and all is a good game. The fun factor only lasted a few days for me and I was bored with it. I still play Max’d but the challenge of it is gone for me. Online play on Xbox’s Live network is the only thing saving Max’d from going to my local used game store on trade in.