Mr. Drizzle's Painkiller Review
posted at 11:00 PM on Saturday, March 20th, 2004
| Publisher |
| Dreamcatcher |
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| System Requirements: |
Win 98/2000/Me/XP
1GHz Processor
256MB RAM
32MB Video Card
1.2GB HDD Space
Recommended Requirements:
3GHz Processor
512MB RAM
128MB Video Card
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| Reviewed Using: |
| Windows XP Pro
1.9GHZ Athlon XP
768 Ram
128MB Vid Card
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Painkiller is a Serious-Sam-esque First Person Shooter from People Can Fly studios. The game opens with a CG scene of the main character dying in a car crash with his wife. The scene changes to a cathedral in purgatory. You’re told that four of Lucifer’s armies are mobilizing to attack heaven. God has a job for our protagonist—to kill the four generals of Lucifer’s armies with the hopes of averting another war between heaven and hell. The payoff is to be allowed to go to heaven to see his wife again. Obviously, he takes the job. I wish he hadn’t.
I was brief in the summary of the story because it really doesn’t matter. This is a zombie-killing game, and People Can Fly makes very little attempt to hide that. After the game’s opening cutscene, the next morsel of story you come across is 1/5th of the game later, in the form of another cutscene. Said scene is delivered in the form of boobies, as your guide through the netherworld just happens to be a busty topless woman (long hair covers the nipples conveniently), clothed in only a very loincloth. Ever wonder if a game was over-budget to the point to whichever dev that sounds the most normal does the voice acting? If you haven’t yet, this game will make you. The dialogue and voice acting are about the same quality as the dubbing on any B-grade Hungarian porno movie you might happen to download off Kazaa. The dialogue is heavy-handed to the point where it parodies itself:
Topless Woman: If you want to see your wife again, you have to kill the demons.
Protagonist: I will kill the demons so that I may see my wife.
TW: Your map shows the demons as being here, but they have moved. You must instead go here.
P: I will not go to the original destination. I will go there instead. I will kill the demons.
TW: Good Luck killing the demons.
P: I don’t need luck. *gestures to shotgun*
Cutscenes of this level of quality occur at the beginning of each new chapter (each chapter is equivalent roughly five or six missions). So brace yourself.
The game makes good use of 3D sound: you can hear when a monster spawns directly behind you, spin around, blast it a couple times with your shotgun, and then continue on your way. The ambient music is unexciting misty sounds when you are not in combat and really irritating metal when you are fighting. The weapons make their appropriate “BOOMs” “SIZZLEs” and “FSHWOOMPs”; very adequate overall. The zombies, demons, ninjas (yes), World War I zombies (yes), demonic samurai (sadly), electric chair demons (sadly), axe throwing hunchbacks, mental patient zombies (….), and friends all make appropriate growls, howls, gurgles, and death yells, but these aren’t anything to write home about.
If you liked the gameplay of Serious Sam, then please, I beg you, go play Serious Sam or its sequel. If you liked Serious Sam and also like dinosaurs, then play Will Rock. If you liked Serious Sam, and the idea of preventing a war between God and Lucifer by killing the four generals of Lucifer’s armies and their mindless minions, I recommend to you Serious Sam or Will Rock. Summing up the feel of Painkiller in terms of gameplay is easy: The game plays like Serious Sam at ½ speed. Every big battle consists of you being locked in an area, and a whole truckload of demons being thrown your way.
I found myself, as I did in Serious Sam, strafing along the walls so that nothing could sneak up behind me or more likely so that I wouldn’t accidentally trigger a zombie to spawn on top of or behind me. Except for the creatures which are hard-coded to snipe you from a distance, all of the monsters are triggered spawns that spawn about 10 feet in front of you after you run past some invisible trip wire telling them to do so. After the monsters have spawned, they operate with impeccable AI. These zombies really put in time practicing deft maneuvers like “run at you”, “slash you”, and “get stuck on parts of the environment.”
I played through the game on normal difficulty, and I didn’t die once. The lowest that my health dropped to was 40, and that was after I accidentally exploded a gunpowder barrel that I was standing on top of. The lowest that monsters were able to bring my health to was 56. For the first four missions I did not go below 99. I am not a great FPS player. Far Cry on easy made me cry to mommy, but this game was a cakewalk. I could’ve played it with my feet or other parts of my body and still managed to rid purgatory of the Magic Samurai Ninjas hell bent on killing me with blowguns…IN AN OPERAHOUSE. The bosses operate on a similar level of difficulty. They are scary, huge and imposing. I wouldn’t ever want to meet one unless I had a stick to throw at it, because the stick would probably kill it. They have the same maneuvers as the regular monsters but also have a special attack to make them extra-deadly. One that comes to mind was, “Throw rocks at protagonist and miss by large margin.”
The one gripe I have which might be nitpicky and not smelly-elephant-going-ballroom-dancing-noticeable is that the detection for hits is slow. I would run past monsters, be 10 feet away, and have an axe slash register. This annoyed me because it was hard to time everything with a two second delay, as you might expect. I’d prefer it if the game itself was hard, and rather than the challenge being posed mostly by stupid mechanics.
The graphics and physics are the only parts of the game that can’t be legitimately faulted. The graphics engine is a beast. They made it themselves and after a little google search I can say with certainty that it is creatively titled the PAIN engine. The levels are all fittingly gruesome, well rendered, have good textures, great lighting, and use vibrant enough colors to be exciting while still being drab enough to still qualify as purgatory. This excludes the opera house…where you fight ninjas and samurai on top of a bright red carpet and under a diamond chandelier. But I’ll get to that in a minute. The physics are exaggerated. For example, when I blast a zombie with a shotgun from point blank range, they fly thirty feet – which is really cool. The physics shine on the landing after the blast, where each baddie lands in their own custom designed rag-doll inspired bone heap. This is, of course, assuming they don’t gib.
The developers offer no explanation for what I am about to tell you, aside from the inference that it is a zombie game, and as such, zombies make sense as enemies. Obviously, you’ve got the classic zombie fare (BRAAINZZ!!) , with maces, swords and armor, hooded friar-like fellows with an infinite amount of BATTLE AXES to THROW AT YOU whose toughness increases with the amount of colors on their robe (grey = 1 hit, grey + red = 2 hits, grey + red + green = 3 hits), flying grim reapers (blue, green and red variety), and death mages with giant glow sticks. These are all explainable, I mean, what well rounded hell-army has no death mages, grim reapers, zombies, or undead friars? But Lucifer, being the head honcho and all, spares no expense. He’s throwing Ninjas with blowguns the size of a 2x4, tentacle demons with bondage masks (think Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas), demonic samurai, zombies crawling on ceilings, electric chair demons, world war one zombies and mentally ill zombies at you. It could be that those silly devs made a list of all the things they thought would be cool in a videogame, put them all in, and figured that the only way to make them belong was to eliminate all semblance of a story to the point where you just went, “Oh, okay,” accepted it, and then shot it with your shotgun.
The first part of the game sort of makes sense: you are in an undead-infested cathedral and you have to kill zombies. That checks out. At the beginning of the second chapter you are in an opera house with no explanation, and inside this opera house you will have to kill over 100 ninjas and over 50 samurai. There is no explanation for this. The next mission takes you into a haunted mental institution where you shoot zombies crawling around on the floor, tied to beds, and generally helpless. This is also where the tentacle demons with bondage masks are found. It’s a pretty disturbing mission, and even more so because like everything else there is no explanation for it. Most of the missions follow this formula: odd enemies and even stranger environments without reason for both except that they might be zombies and naturally, you must kill them. Really, the juxtapositions make about as much sense as a nice round of Millennium Mantra.
But what will you kill them with? There are five weapons in this game, each with an alternate fire. This isn’t alternate fire like Unreal Tournament where standard fire is shooting the gun regularly and alternate fire is shooting it gangsta style. The alternate fire on each of these guns is basically a second gun, and an inside source told me they’ve been paired together by picking names out of hat. With the newbie claw you have a tazer, with the shotgun you have a freeze ray, with the chain gun you have a rocket launcher, with the rifle that shoots stakes you have a grenade launcher, and with the nail gun you have a lightning beam. At least they’re consistent in being nonsensical.
If you’ve played Armed and Dangerous, you know how important weapon balance is. For those of you who haven’t played AAD, let me explain. The machine gun in Armed and Dangerous had nearly unlimited ammo, and aside from a few specialized situations, was the only gun you ever wanted in your hands. This overshadowed some really nifty weapons like the Shark Gun (a gun that released a homing shark to track down opponents and eat them), the topsy-turvy bomb, which turned the world upside and let enemies fall off of it, a fun to use mortar gun, and a very entertaining missile launcher. Fun to use is one thing, but that game threw about as many enemies at you as Painkiller does, and when push came to shove, if you weren’t packing the machine gun, you were stupid or dead.
The same balance issue exists in Painkiller. For the first portion of the game (from level 0 to the level in which I got the chain gun) I used the shotgun. This shotgun shoots some serious heat and in the types of battles you’re going to encounter in Painkiller, that is, with 40 or 50 guys swarming you in a matter of five minutes, you’re going to want to go with the most powerful gun, always. In the second portion of the game (from when I got the Chain gun till the end of the game) that was the only gun I used, if I ran out of ammo I switched back to the shotty. There is no situation outside of Boss fights where I wouldn’t want to use one of those two guns.
Painkiller is a seriously flawed game, but enjoyable. If you are looking for the type of frenetic action described above, and absolutely have to be able to kill zombies, ninjas, army men, and samurai in the same game, then painkiller is the game for you.
Gameplay 2/5
It’s a very forgiving, completely mindless FPS. If that’s your thing, then by all means, play this game. It’s also very derivative and the things that it is derived from hold up better after 1-3 years off the shelf than Painkiller does after one week. The gameplay isn’t good enough to hold up on it’s on yet it is forced to due to the complete and utter lack of a plot.
Aesthetics 4.5/5
The graphics are amazingly well done. Environments and lighting complement each other perfectly to be really, really, spooky in places, and just flat out look really good in others. The physics are a bit cartoonish, but work in context.
Sounds 0.5/5
.5 for the fact that they let you turn it off.
Value 1/5
I played this game so you don’t have to. Even you enjoy the single player, you won’t be playing it again, ever. The multiplayer is very derivative of quake 1, and there are not many maps or interesting modes.
The Verdict 2/5
I spent thirteen minutes of my life in a haunted mental institution shooting zombies that had been tied to beds using straightjackets and other zombies who were crawling on the ceiling. I spent sixteen minutes of my life shooting ninjas and samurai in an opera house. Not to mention the other 22 levels. Let what I’ve said above be your indicator, but pay close attention to the parts where I recommend other, similar yet superior games over this one.
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