Painkiller

Visceral, action-based entertainment will always have a warm place in my heart, way down there with the original Doom and Quake, etc. Games which don’t bother much with plot, but just give you hours upon hours of action. While I enjoy a game with a large arcing plot line, sometimes you just want to get elbows deep in gore and action with little need for a complex story. Painkiller is a game that gives you a double-barreled blast of action delivered point-blank to your face, whether you like it or not.

Ok, let me get the plot out of the way quick-like. You’re a guy, and you and your wife end up in a car crash. She gets to go to Heaven and you’re stuck in Purgatory where you have to fight for your life. After a few decades He (that’s a capital He) says He will forgive all of your sins if you take out the generals of Lucifer’s army, which is being amassed to try to overthrow Heaven. There, like I said, that was quick. The plot isn’t really that involved, but it sets you up with plenty of chances to kill hundreds of enemies for hours at a time.

Now to the actual game itself. As you may have gathered from earlier in the review, this game has a lot of action. There’s only around 24 levels in the game, however with each of the major levels taking around 30 minutes to complete, there’s at least a good 10 or 11 hours of destruction in this game. The game is divided into 5 ‘acts’, each consisting of between 4-6 levels, the last of which is a boss battle with some sort of huge beastie at least twice your size, and sometimes closer to 10 times your size.

The levels themselves are all well designed, with you jumping from an opera house in one level to a modern military base in the next, and to a village ridden with the Black Death in the next. The levels seem to have no connection to each other, but this sort of adds to the charm of the game, waiting to see what the game will throw at you next. The levels all look very interesting, and you definitely get a feeling for whatever area you’re in. The military level, for example, feels like you’re actually on an airforce base, which feel completely different from, say, the plague village level. I have had various friends tell me that they didn’t quite expect the road to hell to look quite so much like a trip to New Jersey.

The enemies also look well designed and move fluidly. With this game, the designers used their own custom designed game engine, so some of the areas have a bit of a tech-demo feel to them, as if the developers had worked really hard on some specific part of the engine, and really wanted to display it, no matter if it didn’t fit with the general feel of the game. Still, despite the sometimes-flashy nature of some of the areas, the game has a wonderful look that doesn’t slow down, even when there are many many enemies on the screen at the same time.

And then for the weapons. It used to be that when you played a FPS, you played it for the weapons, and you knew once you found the last ultimate weapon, that the game was close to being over. This game doesn’t quite do this, but the weapons are extremely fun to play with. First off, each weapon has two firing modes. This isn’t a standard fire and alternate fire; each weapon has two separate weapons in it. For example, your starting weapon, the Painkiller, consists of two weapons, a rotating blade for chainsaw-like attacking, and a beam weapon, which you have to mount into some solid object and shoots a beam between the mount point and the weapon. This allows for some interesting uses in setting traps, and getting long lines of enemies, or enemies coming around corners. There are four other weapons as well, such as the shotgun/freezegun, the stakegun/grenede launcher, the shuriken launcher/lightning gun, and the rocket launcher/chaingun. Each weapon is fun to use, although some weapons run out of ammo far too quickly to use on a regular basis. Some weapons even have combo attacks, which can either clear out a hallway easily, or, to brutalize a movie quote, kill every muffin eater in the room, accept no substitutions.

The enemies in the game, however, are not exactly that bright. They tend to run at you in a straight line, trying to swarm you and hoping you run out of ammo. And, with the large amount of enemies in each level, there is a good chance that may happen. Some levels contain over 400 enemies, which will try to take you down in something resembling a blind rage. The only problem with this is for most levels there are normally three or four kinds of enemies total. So, you may be taking down 400 enemies, but 200 of those will be the same ninja, 150 of those will be the same samurai, and 50 of those will be some sort of strange spider thing. And enemies don’t always match up with their environment. Such as in the example above, ninjas and samurai, you would expect to find enemies like this in a Japanese village perhaps, maybe a Shinto shrine, or something of that nature. You would not expect to find enemies like these in an opera house, or on a huge frozen bridge, yet that is exactly where they are. Other enemies show up in normal places, such as Arabic soldiers and Crusaders in what looks like ancient Babylon, or World War I troops in the military base, so this isn’t so much of an issue as it’s just a small annoyance which brought me out of the game for a few minutes.

All told, Painkiller is a fun game, with very little plot to get in the way of the action. The game challenges you with various tasks each mission to unlock various cards which you can use for special enhancements means that you’ll likely replay some missions several times to get all of the cards and that super-secret ending. But, besides replaying to unlock further content, I can’t see anyone playing this game obsessively. It is great for a gamer that only has a half hour or so to play, and wants to have some fun, but not worry about keeping track of a plot. But, because of that, it also restrains the game from any sort of development in the game, other than just acquiring more weapons and new enhancements. But you, the reader, know if the lack of plot will annoy you or not already.

Rating: 3.5 bodies staked to walls