Game: "Painkiller"
System: PC
Genre: Action
Published by: Other

Reviewer: Dr. Boogie
Posted: 9/8/2009

Review: If you should happen to see a copy of Painkiller floating around the discount bin at your local game store, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Your gut may warn you against picking up a title that boasts the idiotic tagline, “Heaven’s got a hitman”, but the actual game is far less cheesy.

Painkiller is very much an old school FPS. Here, there’s nothing but pure action with little else to get in the way, including story. If you pay attention to the long, drawn out cutscenes involving odd-looking human characters, you’ll pick up on the notion that you play a man stuck in Purgatory for some reason who just happens to be the only thing standing between us and an invasion of demons via graveyards, or something like that.

The point is that you have to find some guns and mow down everything that moves, as well as a few things that don’t move but are nonetheless dangerous. In doing so, you’ll travel to all sorts of interesting places which, while distinct and not too closely related to one another, all roughly fall into the category of locations from horror movies. One level has you gunning down the undead in a graveyard, another has you blasting away at ninjas and samurai in an opera house, and still later you’ll be blasting the monstrous inmates of an asylum. This is what old school thinking is all about; in a nutshell, “look at these cool places! Who cares where you are or why you’re here, just kill all these things!!”

It’s that same line of thinking that leads to you getting a shotgun within seconds of starting a new game. Certainly all the archetypal weapons of the FPS genre (shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, etc) are represented, but the game also includes a couple oddities, such as the gun that shoots huge wooden stakes, and another that can fire both shuriken and lightning, at the same time even. Even your eponymous starting weapon is a unique and deadly tool. You can spin it like an airplane propeller, fire its warhead to hit distant targets, and embed the warhead in a wall while burning enemies with a beam of energy so long as you keep your sights on the warhead.

The levels are separated into chapters that you can revisit at any time from the “map” screen, either because you really enjoyed the panoply of demons you blasted on one level, or because you want to try again to beat a level’s special requirement to unlock a tarot card. Each one grants you either a powerful bonus ability that can be used once per level, or a passive ability that always remains active. It adds an entertaining dynamic to the fighting, although some of the unlocking requirements, particularly those involving the collecting of a certain amount of gold, can get a little annoying.

There’s plenty to love about this game: The enemies are well done and widely-varied; the battle music is nothing but face-melting metal; boss fights are truly epic. All the different elements of the game fit together nicely, and what you’re left with is a first person shooter that eschews all the unimportant peripheral garbage glutting up so many modern examples of the genre and gives you glorious violence and explosions, all within a host of fantastic settings.

The only downside is the follow-ups that were made for the game. The first, Battle Out of Hell, didn’t really add much to the original, and the second, Overdose... well, they really shouldn’t have charged money for that game. Regardless, even if a sequel never emerges, you can rest assured that Painkiller is a game that you won’t mind playing again years later, when you grow tired of playing as a heavily-armored space marine and/or counterterrorism expert.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)