Paintball videogames are for the weak! Why else would you play a paintball videogame rather than do the real thing, other than to avoid getting a body covered with the nasty red boils you get when paintballs batter your skin? Scared of a little pain? Then this first-person paintball simulation is the game for you! You big wuss.

Renegade Paintball's career mode is basically an offline warm-up for Live games. You choose from several paintballing 'greats', including a 13-year-old, erm, ‘professional’, and various attractive women who apparently write for paintballing publication Splat Magazine and a few generic bots with names like "Hairy Andy" or "Newbie Candy". It won't matter who you choose though - there's practically no difference between them, visual or otherwise. There are Elimination matches (shoot all of the opposing team), and capture the flag games (capture... their flag), on either Woodsball and Speedball arenas - the former predictably takes place outdoors with lots of trees and rocks to hide behind, the latter is set indoors, with plenty of inflatable cover. The smaller Speedball arenas are a lot faster, and because it's one-hit 'kills' in paintball you'll be doing plenty of, erm, respawning.

The problems with the single-player begin with some pretty hefty gameplay imbalances; the odds feel totally stacked in the CPU's favour and your AI buddies are comparatively useless. On anything other than the easiest difficulty, the AI opponents use their zen-like powers to nail you from the other side of the woods whenever you pop your head out from behind cover, while your CPU buddies run around doing as they please - except they never seem to be able to hit anything and they absolutely refuse to capture flags.

Another dent in Renegade Paintball's battered bonnet is the truly awful control setup - there's no auto-aim and the stick calibration is all over the place. It's a trial to get your cursor anywhere near your opponent in a heated shootout, let alone when your AI antagonists have more accuracy than Clint Eastwood with a sniper rifle, six cans of Red Bull and a box of Pro Plus.

At least when you're playing on Xbox Live everyone's in the same boat. Once you actually find a group to play with - in itself, no easy task - a session of random paint-spamming is usually what you end up with, thanks again to the dodgy controls. The Live experience itself is riddled with bugs, and being booted back to the lobby after every match - especially as games can often be very short - is incredibly annoying.

But there are some redeeming features. The built-in field editor is a nice addition, letting you take existing arenas and tweak them to your liking, by adding extra giant inflatable things, for

Another of Renegade Paintball's few appealing features is (perhaps unsurprisingly) stolen from Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball. Holding down the Left trigger and using the Left stick lets you lean around corners for sneaky pot-shots, then snap back behind cover as soon as you release the stick; this is a useful manoeuvre, especially in fast indoor games.

Splat Magazine Renegade Paintball is an okay bargain-bin FPS, but it just doesn't compete with proper ‘grown-up' shooters. Although that's hardly a surprise - a simulation of a simulation is hardly the best recipe for success, especially when the first word in its title is ‘splat'.

1. The in-game level editor is easy to use and you can edit the standard game maps. You can also take your maps online, which is nice.
2. Arcade mode is more fun than the rest of the game, with various wacky power-ups helping to distract from the dodgy controls and AI.

1. Poorly calibrated joystick controls make it very difficult to become an accurate shot - auto-aim would have greatly helped.
2. AI opponents feel very cheap and seem to be able to hit you from anywhere. The useless CPU team-mates don't help much, either.
3. The outdoor arenas look a bit bland and generic, and the looping rock soundtracks start to grate after a while.

Alright by budget standards, but with dodgy controls, cheap AI and buggy Live modes there are far better alternatives.