Delta Force -

Visit Date:17/02/02 Game fee: £40 inc. lunch & 500 paintballs Extra Paint: £6 per 100 Walk-on policy: Any gun (chronoed).

Sadly I wasn't too impressed with this site - everyone needs to pay the rent, but here it seemed quality of playing experience had been sacrificed for maximum profit, with too many players for the number of marshalls and the size of the fields.It concerns me that people playing for the first time will think this is how all sites are. It wasn't all bad (see below), but I wouldn't go here again.

Although the games were short, there were lots of them (12 in all), with a quick turnround. Friendly staff. Reasonable food and plenty of it.

Appalling mud. Battered and poorly maintained guns. (but goggles fairly good). Very low ratio of marshals to players. Cheap and unreliable paint. Overcrowded fields with insufficient cover.

Mud, glorious mud

The worst part of the day was the mud. Admittedly we played on a bad day - right at the beginning of the paintball season after a rainy week, but we'd played at the same field before, many years ago, and remembered it from then too. The fields are small, low-lying areas crossed by a number of streams. The hundreds of people who use the site every weekend have churned this up so that in some areas the mud was almost over the top of my boots. The mud stank like nothing else I've ever smelt and got into everything (including the working parts of my gun), I can almost still smell it.

Fields

There was some dramatic and interesting terrain features - the 'Mayan' temple with its Easter Island heads, the cluster of vans and the large village, but in general there were few barricades, and the woods were mostly composed of a few spindly trees with little ground cover. When this was combined with large teams on small fields, in some cases at the beginning of the game there was literally insufficient proper cover for all the players to hide behind. As a result the games didn't seem very tactical but just a chaotic scramble. In many of them we ended up in a stalemate, as there was no cover to advance and such a high number of people that there were no gaps in each team's line, which made the games more boring than they would otherwise have been.