"Sometimes, you just want to blow the crap out of a bunch of insane looking enemies with a huge chaingun and explosives."

Score:
Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 9
Sound: 8
Value: 7
Tilt: 9

Overall: 8.3

The Good: Ridiculously action-packed gameplay; awesome weapons, tons of insanely disturbing enemies; old school FPS gameplay; unique and interesting levels; great looking FMVs; awesome ragdoll physics; runs great on low-end systems; awesome boss battles for a shooter; weapons don't have to reload.

The Bad: Becomes extremely repetitive by the end; too few weapons means the game becomes boring after you've collected them all; sometimes very hard; tarot card system isn't very well developed; one of the most disappointing final boss battles ever.

Painkiller is a one of a kind game nowadays. There are several games like it but they don't come along very often. Painkiller is a throwback to classic first person shooters, and can almost be like a history lesson to the younger generation of what shooters were like way back in the day. Shooters back then weren't so much about running around stealthily picking off your enemies or using strategy and thinking, it was about running into a big room with a bunch of enemies spawning all over the place and you jump around like crazy shooting like a maniac. That's Painkiller in a nutshell. Sometimes you don't want to have a strategic fight with a group of Elites from Halo. Sometimes you don't want to scour around in the darkness for a PDA in Doom 3. Sometimes you don't want to throw objects at people and kill them with the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. Sometimes, you just want to blow the crap out of a bunch of insane and disturbing looking enemies with a huge chaingun/rocket launcher combo that never has to be reloaded. Welcome to Painkiller.

Painkiller throws every thing you know about first person shooters today out the window, and brings back every thing they were about in the good ol' days. Rarely will enemies in Painkiller actually even have guns to shoot back at you with. Most of the time you will find yourself fighting crazy enemies like screaming ninjas who throw ninja stars, giant skeletons with big swords, big fat bikers dudes with machine guns, but mostly it will be about the giant suicidal crazy guys with giant swords and axes that run at you screaming a bunch of different gibberish. And what do you get to welcome them with? Say hello to the painkiller. One of the best weapons I've ever used in a video game. The Painkiller is one of five weapons you will receive in Painkiller and is the first weapon you will receive. However despite the fact that there are only five weapons, each weapon is a two in one combination where the primary fire does one function, and the alternate does something completely different. The painkiller weapon is a rod with rotating blades on the end that will chop up your enemies into mincemeat. The secondary fire propels the blades away from the weapon attaching to any surface. If you aim the remaining portion of the weapon at the general direction of where the detached blades are an orange laser will connect between the two frying anything in between. Other weapons include a double barreled shotgun with an alternate fire that turns enemies into stone temporarily. Shooting them while in stone form will cause them to crumble into pieces. There is also a stake gun which propels stakes in an arc-like fashion that will for the most part instantly turn your enemies into a pile of gibs. These stakes will also pin enemies to walls much like the crossbow from Half-Life 2 (Although Painkiller was released first so it didn't get the idea from that game). The secondary fire is a grenade launcher which is incredibly useful for swarms of enemies, while the stake gun is extremely cool its not always the best choice because of its slow rate of fire. The fourth weapon is a rapid fire shuriken weapon with an alternate fire of shooting a beam of electricity which can fry your enemies. The final weapon is the chaingun/rocket launcher combo which is quite possibly the best and most popular weapon in the game. Being able to blast fools with a rocket launcher and loading their corpse full of a million bullets is the best combination for a weapon I can think of. It's also worth mentioning that none of these weapons ever has to be reloaded, not a single one. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing but for this type of game reloading is not something you would want to have to wait for.

All of these weapons have their applicable uses throughout the game but once you have all of them you will most likely find yourself using your favourite gun so long as you have enough ammo for it. Certain weapons suit each situation more appropriately however so you will use most of a weapons equally throughout most of the single player game. The levels are all pretty well designed and many of them have really awesome and cool looks to them but there are no puzzles at all. This is naturally due to the nature of the gameplay, but you will generally find that the majority of the fighting happens in large outdoor areas or big square shaped rooms. Despite the fact that the game graphically looks amazing the level design can occasionally be slightly drab and feel a bit monotonous at times, but this is also partially due to the fact that the action does become slightly stale by the time the game is over. Anyone who is a fan of old FPS games will most likely love the game for the entirely of it but for those unfamiliar with this type of shooter will have to be slowly introduced to it. Playing Painkiller for long stretches at a time can quickly become stale after the novelty begins to wear off, but it never really becomes that bad.

Painkiller also has this really cool "demon" mode where if you collect enough souls from dead enemies you will temporarily transform and your vision turns completely white. All of the enemies appear as red blurs and when you aim at their location and attack the screen will create a ripple effect and the enemies will simply explode. This is really fun the first couple of times but does lose its touch after a while. It's still a great feature though and can really help out when the going gets tough.

What does keep things refreshing and interesting in Painkiller is that each level has its own distinct look and enemies. The end of each "world" also features a unique boss battle which all of them are pretty fun. The boss fights are the only real puzzles in the game because not all of them simply require you to just shoot them non-stop. The bosses are absolutely huge and are some of the biggest baddies I've ever seen in a video game. Some of them are nearly two-hundred feet tall and could squish you like an ant. But they seem to prefer trying to kill you by other means such as giant weapons. The first time you lay eyes on one of these bad boys in Painkiller is perhaps one of the most memorable moments, and defeating them is a pretty good feeling as well. The only real complaint about the boss battles is that all of them are fun, but the last final boss fight against the devil himself is the worst one of them all, and is also extremely hard, monotonous and repetitive and extremely punishing. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people who die the first couple of times against the final boss will simply stop trying, unless they use cheat codes, but even then this fight is still extremely boring. The reason why this boss fight is dull and repetitive is because you must kill a whole bunch of barely visible ghost enemies in order to change into he demon form. Because this form only last for a little while you need to figure out how to defeat him. However figuring out how to defeat him isn't very easy so you will find yourself fighting hundreds upon hundreds of ghost enemies and only being able to try and defeat the boss for limited amounts of time, at a time.

There are some other gameplay aspects to Painkiller than simply running into big rooms chock full of enemies and blasting them away. There is a tarot card system where if you fulfill a certain task during a level you will be rewarded with a new tarot card which you can use once during a level to bestow your character with a special ability. Things such as slowing down time, and increasing your characters speed are some of the cool spells you can get. Unfortunately many of these cards are really hard to get and even the ones that are easy to get aren't really fun to achieve. This is because the way you get them is pretty boring and dull. Often you will have to do something like "destroy every box in the level" or "collect every ammo crate" which means a lot of hunting around, and there really is no way of knowing if you've found them all. The tarot cards do provide you with a good advantage though so they can save you if you get into a tight spot. The only real downside to them though is that you can only use them on the medium difficulty or higher, so anyone playing on the daydream difficulty (easy) will not be able to use them and will have to go the entire game without ever being able to try them out. And the tarot cards don't necessarily provide the edge you might need on higher difficulties because of the way that they are obtained. You will also be rated at the end of each level on how much gold you collected, ammo crates you found, enemies you've killed and so on. There are also some secret items you can find in the levels much the majority of them are ridiculously hard to find. I barely found any of them on my own throughout the game, and searching for them really takes you out of the action. That also leads to another minor problem. Every time you defeat a group of enemies more won't appear until you reach the next checkpoint where the game is saved. To help you get to these checkpoints there is a compass, however this compass with stop working sometimes and you might end up being extremely confused on where you are supposed to go. Sometimes you will also find yourself aimlessly wandering around wondering where you are supposed to go eventually finding out after you've wandered around for 20 minutes that there is one enemy still alive on a ledge somewhere where you can barely seem him. Moments like this rarely occur but they do happen which is annoying but forgivable.

To compliment the fast paced and insane action Painkiller features heavy rock music that kicks in during battles but fades away when no enemies are present. The music is great, but generally pretty forgettable. It is a great touch though and really gets you pumped up for the fight. The sound effects are also great with tons of gun fire and explosions but because you will be using the same five weapons for the entire game you will hear the same gun sounds quite a lot. The enemies do a good job of off-setting this though since they all have their own sort of gibberish and yelling when they are fighting you and there are a ton of different and bizarre enemies waiting for you.

There is also a multiplayer mode in Painkiller with a couple unique modes but most of them are pretty typical. You can expect modes like deathmatch and team deathmatch but there are also some cool modes like people can fly, which is taken from the name of the developer, where everyone is bouncing all over the place. There is also a neat mode where everyone has the same weapon with unlimited ammo and it will change every once in a while. The multiplayer in Painkiller with be loved by those who love old-school shooters where they can bunny hop around and dominate but to those who are foreign to old-school deathmatch may be turned off by how it plays, with weapons that don't need to reload and people flying all over the place blowing you to pieces. The multiplayer community is also not very big, especially anymore so multiplayer is pretty much the last thing one should have as a reason for looking into Painkiller. Instead, anyone looking for a great classic shooting game with updated graphics, cool weapons and insane enemies will find a pretty cool experience in Painkiller, and the beauty of it all is that its over before you get sick of the nostalgic experience. Painkiller is definitely worth a look by those who fell in love with shooting games all those years ago, and is also worth a look for newcomers to the genre who would like to experience what it was like back in the day without having to play a fifteen year old game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/06