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
