Painkiller is a game that I've attempted to beat many times, and I can confidently say I've played through at least 80% of this game, but could never push myself to complete it. I think I've always wanted to like it because there are many reasons to, but at its core it's just an extremely basic and poorly thought-out shooter.

I remember when Serious Sam came out, most people called it a Doom-clone, which couldn't be further from the truth. Then Painkiller came out and people were comparing it to Serious Sam. I suppose because both games feature big crowds of enemies. But there's a major difference here.

Serious Sam often places you in big and open environments that sometimes have buildings or other obstacles laid out in a manner that lets you maneuver and strategize. It also gives you diverse rosters of enemies and weapons, each of which perform different functions. Certain weapons are more effective against certain enemies, which incentivizes you to constantly switch between weapons to target enemies that might be more dangerous or closer to you at that point in time. There is a lot of complexity to Serious Sam, which I feel often flies over people's heads (maybe even the developers' heads sometimes).

Painkiller has none of that. Most enemies function the same, the roster of weapons is very small and, aside from range, there's no significant difference between most of them. You have your shotgun, your rifle equivalent (nailgun) and your machinegun/grenade launcher. The rest are just variations. Each room functions as a tiny arena that you're locked in with respawning enemies. In most cases enemies spawn from 1-3 same places and you can easily just stand there and shoot at the same spot. Or find a place they have trouble getting to, let them congregate there and do the same. The entire gameplay is dead simple.

That being said, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun. Mainly due to the physics. But of course after a while you get tired of doing the same crap over and over again. The devs tried to spice things up with atrocious boss battles, which only make it worse.

I have to give this game props for how it came across in 2004 though. It was one of the best-looking games of the year, and ragdoll physics at the time were still a new and exciting thing. In addition, it has a pretty cool art-design, especially with some very creatively-designed (from a visual standpoint) enemies.

But in the end it's more of an artifact of the era. It was getting rave reviews at the time, and you can kinda see why, but in retrospect it's clear that the graphics were one of the major contributing factors to this. Whereas, when it comes to the gameplay, you can do much better within the same genre.

P.S. Forgot to point out: this Black Edition includes the first expansion, Battle Out of Hell, and it's terrible. It has some creative locations and designs, but gameplay-wise it's noticeably worse than the original game.

Inbetween long work hours I've been forcing on myself to get shit done on time and as needed, I've been trading off an hour of video editing for my job with a level of Painkiller, after realizing I could actually use a DVD drive if I plugged it into my PC. Painkiller is an incredible piece of soul-driven buggy hackery that I absolutely adore.

This game has a plot, weirdly enough, and one kinda worth following, but for the most part we're looking at a DOOM-type shooter with a level select this time around. It's not just a DOOM clone or anything like that, though, it's got it's own rhythm. When you enter a room in Painkiller, doors lock and enemies spawn. Kill them, doors unlock and you can make your way to the next room. This isn't as repetitive as it sounds, though: each level has it's own 'gimmick' that essentially presents all of these things are their own 'gameplay loop', even if managed by the same system. Take, for example, the level "Old Monastery" towards the end, themed after old-world temples and mysticism. Each loop where a loop restarts is replaced with a giant floating pentagram, placed instead in such a way it feels like you're 'picking them up' this time around. When you do, enemies don't just spawn, they pop out of coffins and claw through walls to get to you! Or, the Black Edition's additional campaign's second level, "Loony Park". A circus themed level, with 3 unique enemy types all it's own, centered around exploring at your own pace and order the different areas of the park. All of it concludes in a sudden shift to rail-shooter, placing you in a roller coaster shooting gallery.

It's main campaign is absolutely LOVELY, too! You explore so many god damn aesthetics, it's such a moment to moment blast, and it never feels tiring. It's got edgy 90s satanism, it's got amusement park ride type ghosts and zombies, and it's got secret Pentagon basement floor military labs.

For as great as the main campaign is, though, the DLC added on with Black Edition is....ups and downs, ups and downs. You know We Love Katamari? A side-game that adds depth to the original by expanding upon the smaller game mechanics the game doesn't ever focus on? Yeah...I don't like We Love Katamari. All the craft brought to it, despite the increase in game-breaking bugs and crashes, makes it worth it, though! Each level has completely unique gimmicks and enemies, usually 2-5 per level, and one of them is egregiously annoying in sound design and level design (which is to say, I love it!).

Painkiller Black is an absolute blast to play from start to finish but I think it depends what you want from your shooter. If you want something more akin to a traditional open level shooter with key collecting and maze-like levels, your Quake, Doom and such then you're probably going to be a bit frustrated.

If you want to just shoot stuff. A lot. Then you're probably in better hands. Like in serious Sam, this is indeed an arena shooter and from the way each weapon feels balanced almost perfectly, to the chaotic ragdolling some of the enemies can use, to the gothic rock blasting out at all times and the incredibly varied level design, theres a lot of no nonsense blasting action here that feels just right on the edge of where it may be too repetitive... Something the series sequels crosses. But thats them.

If I do have some issues, im going to chalk it down to the rather mean spirited way that levels are locked from certain difficulty levels, meaning that if you wanna see everything the game has to offer, you really are going to have to push through some brutally hard moments.

Again. If you want bright colours and maze like key hunts, this wont be your thing. If you want to freeze and shatter an enemy with the same gun and use whats essentially a oversized mixer to fling skeleton enemies around... then this is great.

Recommended
7.9 hrs at review time
Nightmare difficulty
Gameplay 5/10
Music and sound 7/10
Screenplay 5/10
Technical 4/10

Each level is mostly self-enclosed and nothing except special powers (tarot cards, which are unlocked by completing objectives during each level) are transferred.
The game is inspired by Doom, Serious Sam and Quake.
Each level (except the final stage levels) is divided into multiple subsections. An area ''closes'' each time you walk into a red circle, a lot of enemies appear and spawn, you defeat them and then advance to the next part. The levels get longer the farther you get into the game.
The boss stages are pretty cool and probably the best part of the game.
The lack of enemy and weapon variety can make the game boring around the halfway point, which is what happened in my case.
The metal tracks were enjoyable, but a bit on the generic side.
Has its good parts, but could've been much better.

Policy

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I'll get this out of the way first, this game unquestionably flounders in many places: the bosses while impressive setpieces are incredibly unintuitave, the unlocking of cards (upgrades) from doing weird level objectives is a unique mechanic but ultimately unsatisfying to go out of your way to actually fulfill, it has a beyond moronic story where a guy decides to basically cheat on his wife halfway through with both hell and eve rendered through unbearably rendered cutscenes acted out with those FOV porn models, and it uses you playing on a lower difficulty to maliciously taunt you out of being able to play some of its levels. By all metrics these should be damning enough issues to make the game nearly unplayable, yet this is the furthest possible from the truth. What this game fails at in terms of its big moments, it makes up for in the nuances of combat flow and simplicity, allow me to elaborate.

First bit of attention to give is to the autosave system. You can go, gun down hordes of enemies while always feeling there's a potential to make it out a difficult spot, which will then reheal you and autosave the game for you after you clear the area out. Considering each level lasts around 15 to 20 minutes, you get about 5 to 8 of them a level, theres plenty of room for error without having to start from the very beginning. This solves one of the main tensions that I have with usually older shooters: no autosaving system (Max Payne, Deus Ex, and Serious Sam come to mind because they are the most recent games I've played), see I'm an incredibly stubborn person and I often take getting to the end of the level as the 'save' because something feels a bit cheap about saving on my own as an intended functional mechanic. I feel bad doing it, like I'm creating an 'easy mode' through trial and error rather than playing with the function of the mechanics in mind (dodging, posisioning, etc.) This game subtlely takes all the mental exercise and self sabatoge that comes from dealing with this process. Not only that but it cleans up how physically slow and disruptive saving a game is, sometimes you have to open a menu and hit the button to do so. You can hotsave in some of these games, regarding but even then it takes a stable mentalwork not to accidentally hotsave in a place where you will automatically die. This system gloriously and cooly takes all the mental work out of that system while still allowing you to manual it anyway if you're feeling desperate.

Another plus is, ironically, how limited the weapon roster is, you have 4 different weapons and your base weapon, and called the painkiller and right off the bat they made a really smart choice to let the Painkiller actually be an incredibly strong base weapon, it wont save you in a horde but it can take you far. More interestingly they main the subweapon on each of the weapons feel completely distinct. For example, theres a grenade launcher subattack, attached to the stake gun (meant to staple enemies away), which means you can use the main attack to clamp specific enemies away and use the grenade with distance from the horde, all of the weapons have neat unexpected combos like this. It also means they can build levels with the ammo for the weapon types in mind. If they want to, they can make it so theres enough ammo across all of them, but forcing you to oscillate your playstyle and not get too comfortable with just 1 weapon. This allows the pickups to always feel valuable in a way other games might flounder at. It's a quality over quantity approach, and I can appreciate this in particular when compared to other games. Max Payne for example will have you picking up around 10 to 13 weapons in its campaign, but the issue is that you're going to be in a bind in a fire fight if you run out of ammo for one weapon only to then have to frantically scroll through the baseball bat, the beretta, etc. just to get to the shotgun. Either that or you run your finger up from the keys hoping you hit the right number, impairing you capacity to move unless you're just really good at keyboard gaming/memory mapping. By comparison in Painkiller, you run the scroll wheel once, maybe twice, and you have a good weapon, dont even have to think about it. It also just allows for more creative enemy design since by design some of the weapons will be better to use against certain enemies than others, and since new enemies are constantly introduced in every round, with very little enemy reuse, you are forced to experiment and figure out what works.

Now lets say you just got done gunning a room, you realize the door wont open until you kill all the enemies but you don't know where it is. Guess again! You can look at a compass which will show you where the last enemy is, usually perched on some sort of tower. Then, after you dispatch them, you can waltz over to the checkpoint and heal up, which is also shown the direction on the compass! The one other great thing is that during boss fights, the health bar is indicated on the compass rather than bloating up original visual space on the bottom or the top of the screen, with the circular indicator of health being a lot easier to look up at and guess how much there is left then a giant bar like you might see in the likes of say borderlands, or even worse no bar at all which may make you wonder if you're even making progress.

One last thing I want to note is how speed jumping is also incredibly simple, I've never been good at bunnyhopping which means you have to do diagonal jumps for extra movement, this game just allows you to get that movement from regular constant jumping in a direction, which takes attention and skill while still feeling incredibly satisfying to do.

The other thing I really like is how the 'Demon Mode' works, Demon Mode is a mode you activate where after eating enough soul drops from enemies you can just start screaming and ragdolling enemies far away. A lot of games have these sort of contingent 'beast modes' and they always feel great to activate, but in other games the activation is ambiguous, hard to pull off when theres actually enemies etc. Well in this one, beast mode is activated when you pick up exactly 66 souls, and theres warning shots on the like 4 or 5 in a sort of phase in 'windup' (not to mention you can check in the cornor how many you have). This means that if used correctly this mechanic never suprises you, and therefore means you can hold on until you pick up the last soul(s) in a populated area, meaning you dont unleash the attack on wasted breath.

With all these tiny effects stacked up at once, there's no way to put it other than saying it gives the arena fights a beautiful sense of velocity and simplicity I tend to find lacking in these older shooter titles. And the fact the game has a great gloomy lighting effect and lovely architecture often retrofitting real life places into level design means there's not a breath wasted. The quality of life in the action of the gunplay and the assurance that, at least for this brief moment, you are done fighting, means you can take in the scenery and in the process check for items & ammo that much more.

The irony of writing all this stuff about gameplay velocity in several paragraphs is not lost to me, but the reason I feel like bringing attention to it is because I've been seeing people compare this game to Serious Sam, but I'm sorry they dont play anything alike. Serious Sam is a lot slower, illiciting you to focus on positioning, have a save file handy, and just generally your character and the enemies feel a lot slower. I remember I ran into a bull in that game and could only barely dodge it by circle strafing. Often the game would be walk forward, kite a few enemies in aggro and walk back, usually in a hallway if you can, your character moves like a tank in that game. On the contrary, Painkiller is like a roadrunner, leaving games like Serious Sam in the dust. To the extent people can even say the two are comparable, in which the only real comparison point seems to be the level statistics page which give you clarity into how many secrets and enemies are left, there's not much they seem to have in common. I will note though I find this a much appreciated 'cheat sheet' in both games but this is where comparisons begin and end for me. Regardless, if we are assessing game quality here on how fair and cathartic is is to play, its not even a contest, I think Painkiller wins out by a high mile.

Assessed on it own of course I believe it's worth trying this game out if tenatively. Even if you only get through the first 3 chapters, there's more fun gunplay there than I've found anywhere else in a long while. If that's not enough to convince you of the game design value, then at least check it out for the hilarious ragdoll death physics, this engine uses the same engine Dark Souls did, and so anybody deeply amused by how it works in that game wont be let down in this one. Expect to get frusterated, keep a boss guide handy in particular, but otherwise have fun tearing the denizens of hell a new one!

There’s an old joke that says heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are French, the weapons are from Blood, the movement is from Quake, and the personality is from Doom. I may have gotten a bit mixed up there but I’m fairly certain that hell looks something like Painkiller. The visuals are from Quake 2, the enemies are from Serious Sam, and the movement is from Counter Strike, it forms such a perfect palette of blandness that’s almost shocking to experience. Instead of feeling like an arena shooter, it’s more like a courtyard shooter, with all the hallmarks that make the genre enjoyable scaled down to a level that feels almost pitiful. Instead of flying around layered battlefields like in Quake, you walk from flat square to flat square, doing a limp sort of bunny hopping to speed the process up. There’s never a time where you walk into a room and get surprised by the type of enemies waiting for you, they usually just spawn in one-by-one, and the majority are forgettable melee-only chaff to be dispersed in a single hit. The only time you’re required to really think is when searching for the last enemy of a horde, since you aren’t allowed to progress to the next room until every single enemy has been defeated, even when they tend to get hung up on doorways and obstructions. The compass points in their general direction, but if you didn’t notice that a few enemies are running in circles on top of a nearby rooftop, you’ll be left wondering if the game just broke. That’s something that tends to happen a lot in this game, as I had multiple save corruptions that would crash my game whenever I attempted to load. Sometimes I could load a corrupted save, but from that point, trying to save in any form would cause a crash, including the automatic checkpoints. It took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening there and delete all the corrupted saves, so it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the majority of times I launched the game were when trying to recover from a crash.

Honestly, this is one of the rare times I have nothing nice to say about a game. The closest it gets is with its unique alternate fire-modes like the ones from Blood, but the enemy reactions are so devoid of personality and the ammo pickups are so unreliable that I hardly noticed their presence at all. The story is peak 2000’s supernatural schlock, the protagonist is totally unlikable, the bosses are all confusingly bad, I really can’t recommend this game to anyone. If you haven’t played Blood or its recent port, Fresh Supply, I would go check that out instead. It’s bursting with personality, and it was able to pack in much more fun and challenge than Painkiller was able to manage with every possible technical advantage.