Reviewed: April 13, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
DreamCatcher Interactive

Developer
People Can Fly

Released: April 12, 2004
Genre: FPS
Players: 32
ESRB: Mature

9
9
9
9
9.0

System Requirements

Painkiller pays homage to the glory days of FPS games with religious overtones that eerily resemble games like Doom and Quake. While parents and conservative senators will protest the occult themes, pentagrams, demons, and excessive blood and gibs, hardcore gamers are going to find countless hours of intense non-stop shooting action.

Story is secondary in a game like Painkiller, but there is a feeble attempt to tie the 24 levels of bloodletting together with a plot. You play as Daniel Garner, killed in a car crash and sentenced to eternity in Purgatory, that is, until you make a deal to defeat Satan and his four generals. Why weren’t you allowed into Heaven? Why does God need a hitman? How many shotgun rounds does it take to kill the devil? These and other questions might just be answered if you have the skills required to rid the universe of the ultimate evil.

It’s all fairly linear and there is no backtracking until you defeat the final boss at which point all doors open and you can freely explore the level and pick up anything you may have missed. A word of caution – souls and gold coins have an expiration date and will vanish from the level and your grasp if you aren’t quick enough.

There are no puzzles, no adventure elements, no conversations, or characters to interact with, just good old-fashioned combat with more than 50 wildly creative monsters of demonic origins using some of the most original weapons ever seen in a FPS title.

That’s not to say Painkiller is lacking substance. For those up to the challenge there are all sorts of tasks that will keep the perfectionist gamer playing this game infinitely longer than the casual demon slayer. Each level has a laundry list of goals. There are secret areas, armor pick-ups, holy items, and of course the obligatory perfect scores for monsters, souls, and gold coins. Each level also has a “card challenge”, a specific task you must complete to earn a Black Tarot card.

The implementation of the Tarot cards is probably the most ingenious device ever added to a twitch-shooter such as this. Earning cards requires you to finish a level while meeting certain objectives or restrictions. You might have to kill all monsters, smash all breakable objects, find all secrets, or beat a boss within a certain time limit.

Once you earn a card it is added to your deck. There are 24 possible cards you can collect throughout the entire game but you may only have five of them activated at any time. Cards come in Silver and Gold. Silver cards give you permanent enhancements during the entire level while Gold cards give you a once-per-level use for a short duration. You can pre-load up to three cards in your “hand” but when you activate the cards all of them are activated at the same time. This encourages a bit of strategy in picking a good combination of cards that complement each other and the particular level you are playing.

Placing a card in the active “hand” costs a significant amount of gold, but you are refunded half the amount when you return the card to the deck. This deters casual card exchanges and makes you “think”. One of the silver cards allows souls to remain in the level longer giving you more time to collect them. This is a great card to keep installed until you get the challenge to “not” collect a single soul during the Train Station mission. Removing that card from the deck helps with this goal.

In addition to being just another collectible item, Souls also serve another important purpose. When you collect enough of them your character will temporarily morph into a powerful demon. During this short time the screen goes into a photonegative mode where everything is black and white and enemies are bright red. You are invulnerable during this time and a single shot decimates any who stand before you. They are literally ripped to pieces with parts flying all over the room.

Even though the challenge is great the game design is surprisingly friendly. After you clear out each room a red pentagram appears. Pass through this to checkpoint your progress and if you are playing on either of the first two skill levels you will even get full health restored. The game also autosaves at the beginning of each level, making this one of the best saving system I’ve seen in a PC game ever. Frankly, there is no need to ever manually save or even quicksave your game, but those options are still there if you want them.

Once nice feature of the autosave is that it saves your game “before” you make changes to your deck of cards. That way if one combination of cards isn’t working out you can create a new combination without wasting precious gold.

While the concept of battling demons with shotguns, rocket launchers, stake guns, or any of several other wickedly cool weapons might not be the most realistic, the physics in this game certainly are. Using the Havok 2.0 physics engine, Painkiller sports some of the best physics I’ve seen in any FPS game to date. Explosions send bodies (or body parts) flying in all directions, even right at you and over your head, which can be quite unnerving. There are also explosive barrels and kegs that you can blast to create some impressive chain reactions. There is gravity and friction, or rather lack of friction on the icy snow bridge level.

While the enemy AI adheres to the “mob mentality” there are some impressive displays of simulated intelligence. Large groups of enemies will often break up and try to surround you. Various enemy types will combine their efforts. Snipers will take shots at you from above while closer targets distract you. Don’t be surprised to see rival monsters fighting each other at times. The enemy has uncanny accuracy but nothing a little nimble dodging can’t avoid. As with most games of this type, circle-strafe is your best tactic, at least until you’re surrounded.

Combat is exquisite thanks to the wonderful selection of well-balanced weaponry and unique firing modes. There are five weapons, each with two documented fire modes and a third “hidden” mode that you need to figure out. For example, your primary weapon, the Painkiller is a whirling blade of death that is great for mangling enemies up close and personal. The secondary fire shoots out a bladed hook that can yank an enemy towards you where you can finish them off. You can also lodge the hook into a wall and create a beam of deadly energy that rips through enemies. The “third” fire mode for the Painkiller weapon is a combination of spinning the blade with the primary fire then pressing secondary fire to launch a boomerang-style spinning blade that rips through enemies or ignites barrels or kegs before returning. There are even some combo attacks to master such as launching an enemy into the air then shooting them for bonus damage.

Painkiller offers a substantial multiplayer experience for up to 32 players on a LAN or over the Internet. There are five game modes to choose from including your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch variations. Things get really creative with the People Can Fly mode. This mode takes place on specially designed maps and you only get a rocket launcher. The trick is that you can only kill opponents while they are airborne.

Voosh is another intriguing variation where everyone starts with the same weapon and there are no other weapon pick-ups. At predetermined intervals everyone’s’ weapons are replaced. You can setup the order of the weapons or have them picked at random.

The final mode is called Light Bearer and everyone scrambles to find the Rage power-up. This power-up is permanent for as long as your player is alive. When you are killed the power-up becomes available for someone else to get, and the person who is in Rage mode when the timer expires is the winner.

The net code is very solid and even though the game is less than a week old there are already hundreds of severs hosting thousands of gamers with great ping times. Anyone with a solid broadband connection should find some great online gameplay potential with Painkiller.

The lip-synch is slightly off but when the primary female character only has a few wispy strands of hair standing between you and gratuitous nudity you probably aren’t looking at her lips. The movies do transition nicely with the gameplay, matching scenery and events, but the story often leaves gaps making you wonder how you got from a swamp to a train station.

Level design is spectacular with some massive levels that defy conventional FPS gameplay. There are 24 levels that are meticulously created with no shared textures between the stages. Every level it totally unique, both in design and artistry. Additionally, some levels are actually built brick by brick from the ground up so they can be torn down, brick by brick. Just watch a certain boss tear down his battle arena as bricks rain down on your head.

Monsters are ultra-cool and totally original. The axe-wielding monks are very sinister and the soldiers in gas masks are scary enough to cause nightmares. Then you have these insect-like creatures that skitter across the floor and when you shot them a face-hugger creature breaks off and continues the attack. And don’t even get me started on the massive bosses that cap off each chapter in the Painkiller story. These are perhaps the most frightening creatures ever created, and their massive size dwarfs your character making you feel very insignificant.

Painkiller uses a new proprietary 3D graphics engine, called "The Pain Engine", featuring all the next-gen graphics technology like: pixel shaders, volumetric lights, and particle effects. My one and only complaint with the visuals is that the lighting and shadows are not dynamic. The shadows are “painted” into the scenery, so while they look real, they don’t flicker or change against a moving light source.

The weapons are all perfectly enhanced with just the right reload and firing sounds starting with the wooden thunk of a stake slamming home followed by the twang of the bowstring as it launches followed by the sickening crunch as the stake impales a demon into a nearby wall with a subtle splash of blood. Explosions are loud and chain reactions are deafening.

You can’t have an ass-kicking game without a kick ass soundtrack and Painkiller delivers with a wild mix of high-energy acid rock, heavy metal, and some delightfully demented atmospheric tunes that reminded me of the NIN soundtrack from Quake. The music flares up in volume and intensity during combat then settles down to reveal the subtle environmental effects that bring these levels to unearthly life.

The voice acting is merely average with a few standout performances but none of them from the major characters. The story and script is admittedly filler material for those that require some continuity to their carnage, but overall it’s a solid sound package.

Of course beating Painkiller at all the skill levels is only part of the challenge. You have more than a half-dozen statistical challenges for each level not to mention competing for best times. Winning Painkiller might take you 12-15 hours but “completing” Painkiller will take you weeks, perhaps months. Then you have those wonderful online modes to keep you busy.

Unfortunately, the Pain Engine is still relatively new and not easily accessible to the general public so don’t expect any mod tools or user-created content anytime soon. Even so, there is more than enough game and pain in this black box to make it worth every cent of the $40 price tag.

With killer weapons, frightening monsters, massive levels, and a bleeding edge audio-visual package, this is hardcore action at its finest. Painkiller is destined to redefine if not reinvent the FPS genre.