Rating: Mature
Developer: People Can Fly
Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive
Release Date: July 24, 2006
Genre: First-Person Shooter/Horror
Is your brain tired after the long missions of Halo’s campaign? Do you ache after lengthy sessions of Battlefield 2? Are you eyes tired after interminable creeping in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory? Here. Take one and call me in the morning. Painkiller is just what you need.
Painkiller: Hell Wars, out now and retailing for $30, is a first-person shooter that although released in 2006 was born in 1994. The gameplay is very Doomish, with monsters spawning like crazy until, well, they don’t. Then it’s time for a checkpoint.
But don’t think that playing Painkiller will be just a decade-old retread. Painkiller manages to be mindless while including its own modern twists that make it a nice diversion from those pesky games that require brains to go with their brawn.
Painkiller starts with a corny cinematic (the first of many) that is probably best enjoyed in the company of good friends that can appreciate the lack of quality with you. There a number of these peppered throughout the single-player game–and some even feature partial nudity! “Classy” is one word I won’t often use in this review.
Once the basic premise is explained–slay Satan’s generals and receive passage into Heaven–you are plopped into a graveyard where zombie soldiers soon attack. One question that may occur to you is “Why is there a graveyard with graves in Hell?” Well, Painkiller is well ahead of you and that question is actually answered in a later Oscar-worthy skit. The zombie soldiers are one of many, many enemy types that you will encounter during your damned journey. While none of them show much intelligence, artificial or supernatural, the developers have done an impressive job differentiating their attacks and appearance.
One brand of creepy death-monk-things slashes you with a scythe. If they’re successful, it will poison you and drain health or slow you down to a crawl, making it much harder to avoid other attacks that each cause the screen to shake and blur. Deranged friendly-neighborhood-butchers shamble toward you while throwing bleeding slabs of meat.
A few seconds after an enemy’s second death, his soul appears. When you gather 33 of them, you become temporarily invincible. This ability is almost a hassle, because you always want to pick up souls to increase your health, so trying to save this ability for strategic purposes is aggravating. Plus, it is very, very, short and it is hard to really tell what you’re doing while it is in effect.
Like every good throw-back, Painkiller features boss battles that are more spectacle that special. The generals you mist defeat are huge, but are often killed the same way as the rank-and-file: shooting anywhere and with anything until they’re dead. At least they look cool.
Standard enemies always move in packs, with many teleporting in before each area is cleared. Fortunately, you have a variety of weapons to use against the unholy cannon fodder.
Your first, infinite, and most practical weapon is called, seriously, The Painkiller. Notice the capitals. It’s primary fire is pain (a spinning blade) while the secondary fire is killer (a harpoon type thing that allows you to send a continuous a beam of destructive energy to where it lands, killing anything in its path). I am seriously paraphrasing those descriptions from the manual. This weapon is fun and useful to use. In an example of inventiveness, you can use the primary fire to spin up the blades and then use secondary fire to launch it at enemies, leading to gloriously bloodied corpses sliced into quarters.
The other five weapons all have two modes of fire as well, which effectively means 10 additional weapons since none of the modes really have anything to do with each other. This means that the sniping bolt-gun features a grenade launcher and the chain gun/rocket launcher is actually called just that. The weapons are all fun to use and wreak their own variety of gory mayhem. What is odd is that you can only map two weapons in addition to the painkiller to the D-pad. However, you can remap these two hotkeys anytime, so I don’t know what some of the unused buttons (such as Y) couldn’t just have been used as additional weapon selection keys.
Painkiller also has things to collect and unlock. Gold is littered throughout levels in its natural environment: pots, urns, coffins, and everything else that is destructible. This is the currency for placing tarot cards, which can be found in secret areas and unlocked by completing a level in a specific way, like only using a certain weapon or breaking every object. Each card grants additional abilities, like half-damage and extra speed. These power-ups make the harder difficulties possible and add a layer of strategy because you must choose when and where to activate them.
As far as multiplayer goes, Painkiller offers a smattering of options and the gameplay is a dead-ringer for the deathmatch of yore and only supports 8 players. The action is very fast and boils down to frantic running and desperate aiming. The weapons are as fun to use here as they are in the single-player game.
The Painkiller series has sought to take the mantle of madcap killing by the thousands. Like Serious Sam, it mixes hordes of enemies with lots of power-ups, fantastic settings, and potent weaponry. It is a decent distraction for the price and offers at least a dozen hours of entertainment and incentive to play more than once. The requirements to unlock tarot cards are especially fun to attempt. While not really spectacular in any way, Painkiller is a pleasant diversion. It won’t cure your desire for more serious and challenging fare, but it will dull it for a while.
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