Painkiller: Overdose

"Third time unlucky..."

I loved Painkiller loads, and I liked Battle Out Of Hell a lot too. A lot of people felt like BOOH was a bit of a letdown after the original PK, and in some ways it was, though it was only supposed to be an expansion with an added ten levels. Overdose is marketed as a new Painkiller game, supposedly trying to rival the original in its own right. Unfortunately, Overdose could be called Look How Much Worse Battle Out Of Hell Could Have Been. BOOH looks positively wonderful next to Overdose.

I first played Overdose in its demo form, got as far as the first main boss (about six levels into the campaign) and packed it in. Uninstalled it. It was so buggy it wasn't true, mainly in the Dead Marsh level. It was clearly unfinished and the game needed far more work in every aspect, not just the bugs. It's a pity, because I was hoping to write a guide to Overdose based on the demo, but it was impossible to alt-tab twice in a row without the game alternately crashing / hanging / BSOD'ing.

So I waited and got the 'full' game for Christmas. Were those same bugs fixed? Nope, not really, though they seem to have reduced the horrendous loading times a little, which was something to be grateful for. I still managed to write my guide, but Overdose is still very fond of crashing, again particularly in Dead Marsh. Since this is the single most frustrating PK level ever for people wanting the tarot card at the end of it, I very nearly gave up again and uninstalled. Instead I persevered and got past the Marsh, and the game got - marginally - better afterwards.

I must admit to being really disappointed and let down by Overdose. It was originally a fan-made mod which gained momentum until it ended up being released as a new PK game altogether. This is a very bold statement. PK was fun, you see. It was original in an atavistic way, and it was mindless, gleeful carnage. Level design was perfect for the game type, monsters were many and varied and lunatic, art direction was superb within its limits, and even the weird, disjointed nature of the different levels worked in its favour. Well, we saw all these things in PK, and they were still there in BOOH, by which point we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but getting pretty tired of them all the same. Overdose should have been something totally new, upping the ante in every department, using today's graphics and sound capabilities, introducing a new and worthy storyline and characters... I could go on.

Aside from two or three memorably decent levels - Ragnarok, Animal Farm, something else I've forgotten - the levels are pretty bland. The designers' approach to it seems to be 'bung in whatever random locations we didn't get to visit in the previous games', but this doesn't make those locations fun to play in. They might be fun to play in if level design was better, but it frankly sucks. Many are all on the one level - just kill everything here, walk through that door, repeat. This was true in very few PK or BOOH levels, there was lots of variation and unpredictability. Overdose gets very boring in terms of moving through the areas of each level, and it's not often then game really surprises you here.

Enemies are nothing to write home about either. This is another area which BOOH had pretty much exhausted, and there's really little new here; unless you count tentacles which rip off Halflife as new. The monsters almost all still either hurl projectiles or run at you madly. Even the chopper women are really just the same as beasts. As for the bosses... well... meh. The first boss can be dropped in record time, the second boss is quite a bit better, though the arena you fight him in is again bland, and the final boss, while tough to beat, looks very much like Sephiroth from FF7. The final arena is a lot better but the boss himself is forgettable. This is no Lucifer or King Alastor.

The game claims to be new and refreshing from the weapons standpoint, but this isn't quite true. Or at all true. Four of them are carbon copies of weapons from PK, it's just that they've changed the skins. The others are OK but nothing tremendous and nothing really original. There may even be too many weapons now, as you spend a lot of time cycling through them trying to remember which one does what and what order they're in. Since nearly every one of the weapons does something very similar to at least one of the others, this 'variety' seems pointless and unnecessary. Ammo is tough to recognise as being for its respective weapon too.

Graphics are the same as they ever were. Other than a few breath-taking skyboxes I can't think of anything that will make you want to stop and stare in awe. One or two moments in Animal Farm - the only really Painkiller-ish Overdose level for its horror and gruesomeness - made me laugh, but otherwise I was pretty bored, hoping that maybe the next area would be better.

Sound is typical PK in many ways, except that the music has now become massively crap, to the point where you must turn it off. This in turn helps spoil the ambience, so you're faced with putting up with the rubbish music or having no music at all, thus killing the atmosphere. You can either have ruined atmosphere or no atmosphere - thanks a bunch. And the frigging voice of Belial - WHY?! Why take a game with so much potential atmosphere - as PK and BOOH had - and overlay stupid catchphrases and jokes on top? This totally takes away any sinister, demonic feel and turns it into a cartoon. It's impossible to take the game seriously when your protagonist is singing Queen songs at you. I can't overstate how bad this feature is.

What else... Oh yeah, the tarot cards and the secrets, two things which kept PK and BOOH players coming back for more. We all wanted to crack every secret, pick up every relic and collect every card, as it gave the games a sense of complete completion, rather than just getting to the end by killing the final boss and nothing much else. PK had some fiendish secrets, and BOOH was no walk in the park either. Overdose has only one tough secret area, and it's not tough to find, only to reach. Every single other one is a joke. They might as well have placed signs to them. So that's the secrets ruined. And the tarot cards? Largely useless. There are five or six you'll want, and the rest are obviously throwaways. The game further spoils the cards by setting conditions which don't allow you to use them properly in subsequent levels, such as a card which might be useful being given a cost to place which is far too high for you to possibly afford when you need it placed; and later the card is useless anyway because you're nearly finished. There are various reasons why the cards suck, I won't go on about it. And if you're wondering why the tarot board has so many spaces for cards on it, it's not because Overdose can be installed on top of PK and BOOH, letting you collect every one of the cards from all three games at once; it's because the programmers merely transplanted the board from BOOH into Overdose without bothering to redesign it.

The game is full of such corner-cutting and lack of innovation and imagination, it's unfinished and it doesn't deserve your money. I can't see myself hurrying to reinstall this game and I'm sorry I let someone buy it for me at Christmas. It only gets 6/10 because it does keep certain things that were good in the previous games. It's not a terrible game, it's just not good enough to be a Painkiller game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/15/08

Game Release: Painkiller: Overdose (EU, 11/23/07)