The intensity of first-person-shooters and extreme sports collide in Millennium Championship Paintball 2009. Feel the adrenaline of intense tournament and woodsball action as you take your game to the next level. The game features over 35 tournaments including official NPPL and Millennium field locations and layouts; Huntington Beach, Commander's Cup, Toulouse, Malaga, and more; plus intense woodsball levels; includes Career, Quickplay, Multiplayer, Tutorial, and Training modes; Over 110+ pieces of officially licensed gear; JT Sports, Tippmann, Spyder, Smart Parts and many others. The 3D modelling uses the same technology as for Call of Duty's weaponry. Upgradeable and unlockable markers, barrels, hoppers and protective gear. It's also compatible with the Wii Zapper for the true feeling of laying paint...

Millennium Championship Paintball 2009 looks like an extremely fun and flashy game when you examine the box, but once you start to play it you soon see its many flaws - such as bad controls and extremely similar arenas. But its not all bad, there is an amazing looking and original customisation where you can change your character's clothing and paintball guns and there’s also the roster where you can manage your own team and improve there stats.

To get the most out of this game you're going to really need to use the Wii zapper to move and help you aim - using the Wii controller and the nunchuk on their own is too complicated and frustrating. Even with the Wii zapper the controls take a lot of getting used to at first. It doesn't help that when you're waiting for a game to begin you generally relax your arms and put the controller down, or at least off the screen. This means that when you're back to playing the aim is off and you're looking at the floor, or spinning around to face the opposite direction. With only three seconds to correct this before playing, you're most likely to be splattered with paintballs before you're facing in the right direction.

When you first start to play the game you value your computer controlled team-mates a lot because they will, most of time, cover your back and save you from being hit. However, as your skill starts to increase, you soon get used to where your team-mates are and start flanking your opponents. As you start to progress through the game you get to recruit people to your roster and use them in the rest of the game.

Paintball 2009 has an extremely colourful equipment system which allows you to choose what your character and team look like down to what their paintball gun looks like to what ammo pods they carry. The customisation is amazing and any professional paintballer or casual fan of paintballing will fall in love with the amount of detail straight away.

There are lots of cool a features when you play in a game. These include being able to give commands to the rest of your team - such as to hang back and play defensive or to go all out and get eliminations by whatever means. There are also other more simple features like sprinting and climbing over things to help you around the arena.

There are some other realistic features that improve the game play - like being able to use both buttons on the nunchuk which can help you fire faster and is what professionals do to improve the speed of shooting. Also if you reload whilst moving you can lose a percentage of your paintballs.

On the negative side the arena's are too similar looking and too small and unless you are a real fan of paintball, there's not a lot here to keep you playing after a few hours.

If your willing to give this some time you will eventually see that it is an extremely creative and amusing game where you can get a good sense of team work. But really this is a game meant for paintball fans and people who love to customise characters and teams - other than that it is not recommended.

6

Carl Simpson