Painkiller

Released April 9th of 2004, a first person shooter, looking like the games of old, like Quake or Doom touched down upon the shelves of game stores. The Developers known as "People Can Fly" (PCF) brought into play what a lot of deathmatch fans have been waiting for.

Painkiller is a simple game in itself. Kill everything that comes in front of you. Anything and everything you see moving, shoot to kill. Why you ask? Because if you don't, it will waste no time ripping you apart. Giving the player 5 weapons to choose from, with each weapon having 2 types of functions, PCF wanted to focus on the functions of the weapons, more than the amount of weapons and they definitely succeeded. While gracing through the five weapons, you'll find yourself upon the Stake Gun, a gun that does what it sounds, shoots stakes at the enemy. The cool feature with this is that it pierces the enemy and sticks its body to the wall, column behind it. You'll definitely find yourself finding all the ammo you can for this weapon shooting everything around you just to see bodies pinned to the wall.

The story is simple, you're Daniel Garner, a man killed in a car crash along with his girlfriend, but you are chosen to fight back the attack of demons and creatures from Hell and the only way you can see your ladyfriend again is to complete this mission for the angels. So, through the five levels that has about 4-5 stages within them, you'll go through different parts of purgatory and Hell shooting every type of monster you can think of.

You'll be accompanied along the way by Eve herself, only through cinematic movies between levels and another high up angel on your crash course to defeat Satan himself.

Graphics and physics go hand in hand with this title. PCF definitely spent their time getting in done right. It's not the most beautiful game, graphically speaking, but you're in Hell, what do you expect? Sanding beaches and jungle filled islands? Some other game What you will find is parts of buildings that you will be able to shoot out such as: See a monster on top of a column and you can't reach him with a simple grenade launcher, use that same grenade launcher to shoot out the column and have the monster come to you.

The A.I. for the game is like any other first person shooter, you see monsters, they see you, you either shoot or run as far back as you can. And if you run out of ammo, take out the weapon known as Painkiller, a swirling blade that you can shoot out to grapple enemies and tear through their bodies as bloods spurts across the screen.

A large part about this game would have to be the multiplayer types of deathmatch which there are 5 of ranging from the original deathmatch to "light bearer." The controls feel very smooth in this game and to go along with the controls, while you're shooting shot after shot into the denizens of Hell, you'll hear a great "rock" soundtrack to keep you going at the fast pace that the game goes through.

A cool feature in the game is the number of levels allowed to the player through different difficulties. Starting out at normal, you'll get a set number of levels, but by raising the difficulties and passing certain feats during the game, you'll unlock new levels in the game. And you ask what would be a good reason to play this game over to open up these new levels? The BIG, in all sense of the word, bosses. The game introduces Huge, enormous bosses that will tower 100 times your height in the sky as you reel your mouse down to take in all their ugliness.

Patches have been released to fix many bugs that shipped with the game, but this reviewer didn't see too many glitches in the initial release version. And I recently heard that an expansion is planned.