ic-games Review - Painkiller - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

ic-games Review - Painkiller - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii ic-games Review - Home - Review, Preview and Interview for PC, Xbox,Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

Painkiller

Information
Reviewer: James Collins
Developer: People Can Fly
Publisher: Dreamcatcher/Mindscape
Reviewed: PC
Genre: First Person Horror
UK Release: 16th Apr 2004
Article Date: 12th Apr 2004
Difficulty: Medium
Retail Price:
Price Comparison:
0

Score Breakdown

Experience:
Game Play:
Graphics:
Sound:
Overall Score: 86%

Discuss this review in the Forums

Pros

Death mode is stunning

Unique Tarot Card system

It's Like Doom

Only £29.99

Cons

FMV

Screenshots

22 of 66

Painkillers introduction starts off quite ominously as two figures leave their house and head towards their car parked in the driveway. Like a gentleman the man opens the car door for the wife and they soon head off into the distance. As the rain drives even harder against the windscreen the wife mentions that they sure picked a great day for her birthday party (She’s dead then – Ed). As the husband picks up speed to get to the party on time he reassures her that its only raining a little, and the traffic wasn’t that bad. To comfort her he places his hand on hers (Ok, scratch that, they are both dead then – Ed). As he does this, he takes his eyes off the road and heads strait into a lorry killing them both instantly. (See! See! – Ed)

Unfortunately for the husband, (Daniel Garner) he doesn’t quite end up in the same place as his wife, he stops short of Heaven and finds himself in purgatory instead. If he wants to complete his journey to Heaven then he must first "complete" a task. The forces of hell are planning a final onslaught on Heaven, and you must single-handedly kill all four generals of Lucifer's army, but before you get to meet the four bosses you’ll encounter literally thousands of hell spawn on the way.

As far as the sheer out body count goes, Painkiller indeed mixes with the best of the best. Not since Doom, or the cartoon copy, Serious Sam have we been treated to this type of out and out carnage. While Serious Sam was compared to Doom (probably due to the volume of monsters on screen), Painkiller is certainly a far better comparison mainly due to that old school horror and suspense – and that ‘cack your pants’ feeling as you cautiously await the next wave of demons. And herein lays the success of this title, without a doubt this game has some serious scary moments and it’s a credit to the developers “People Can Fly” for adding a genuinely horrific atmosphere while still maintaining a 15 certificate.

The graphics are a sight to behold and a quick glance at the screenshots will certainly confirm this to anyone. Painkiller's proprietary 3D engine is said to deliver over 100 times the polygons of even the most recent first person shooters and with texture quality on high, it's certainly not hard to see why, graphically Painkiller is in a world of its own. Refreshingly, even with everything ‘maxed out’ with our mediocre test machine with a lower end Barton 2000 and Radeon 8500 inside, everything ran smooth as silk. Quite impressive considering the sheer volume of hell spawn that was on the screen during some of the hectic battles. 350,000 polygons displayed at any one time with barely any slowdown has to be quite a feat considering most developers rely on the end users powerful machines rather than refining code. (Each enemy has around 4,000 polygons each, you do the math as to how many you’ll encounter at any one time!) With full rag doll physics and skeleton based damageable models - limbs, heads and other body parts flying over your head as you blast them with your chain-gun becomes a regular occurrence. If that wasn’t enough, the award winning havok 2.0 engine guarantees a highly damageable and interactive environment. Unlike “Chrome” the rag-doll physics are not just highly over exaggerated, but with close shotgun blasts you actually get some considerable model damage.

As with Doom, any plot that Painkiller has is certainly not played out during the actual game, but rather during the end level FMV sequences. During these 20 or so levels (split over four acts) you rarely are questioning what your goal will be as it will usually involve just blasting your way through a very linear path with your compass pointing the way to the next teleport. Linear though isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you’re actually enjoying the frantic action between these levels. In a homage to Doom, monster counts and other statistics are proudly displayed if you manage to survive and fight your way to the end of the level, any secrets you miss are also displayed which no doubt adds to the replayability of the level if you manage to complete the game on all but the hardest difficulty levels.

And there are five difficulty levels in all, with similar ‘Doomish’ names (though we can’t recommend enough that you don’t start on the easiest two). While the ‘Knightmare’ difficulty level is just that, it’s probably where most seasoned first person fans should start the game to appreciate it the most. This is not only because the first two levels are ridiculously easy, but it’s because this level guarantees you access to the unique ‘tarot card’ system (which we will explain later) to help balance the odds – while you can choose not to use these bonus cards, later on in the game you might find yourselves becoming particularly fond of them, especially against the four difficult bosses you will no doubt be coming across.

With such a varied amount of enemies (around twenty) is comes as a slight disappointment that there are only five weapons in total in Painkiller in which to dispatch them, although as you would expect nowadays each weapon does have an alternate firing mode. Most of the weapons also have a double use when you unite the primary and alternate firing modes. (For example using the shotgun and freeze ray together to first incapacitate an enemy with the freeze ray and then shattering them with the shotgun).

Whilst the game will be heavily compared to ID’s Doom by many (it’s too blatant not to notice) Painkiller does have a few unique tricks up its hellish sleeves. For a few seconds after enemies are dispatched by the player, they release their souls in the form of a green smoke which you are invited to collect to regain a small amount of health. After you have collected enough of these souls, you'll automatically transform into a fast-moving, invincible spirit that can demolish any enemies in your vicinity. The actual effect is a sight to behold as the screen swirls and turns black and white while any remaining enemy turns bright red. In this mode as mentioned your almost god-like and can cause absolute devastation on anything that’s stupid enough to get in your way. The effect doesn’t last long but it does encourage the player to collect these souls religiously just to experience this automatic bonus effect all over again.

And you’ll be collecting more than just lost souls. Scattered around the Painkiller universe you’ll come across treasure chests and barrels, and once these items are destroyed (with great havok2 effect) you can collect the coins that they once contained. At the end of the level these coins can be used to activate the “black tarot cards.” These cards must first be unlocked by fulfilling certain conditions in each level though, which can range from killing all monsters or collecting all the souls in a level. You’ll almost certainly be repeating the vast majority of the game just to collect the full deck of cards. Basically these cards grant certain bonus conditions that can give you the edge in the next level (for example taking only half damage or causing everything to slow down in pure Max Payne fashion).

In conclusion, while we may well be mocked for saying as much, Half Life 2 and DoomIII certainly seem to be paling into insignificance now with release date after release date. Painkiller has one major advantage over these two giants, and it’s simply that this particular graphical masterpiece is available now; and you can play it. Painkiller has a more than adequate multiplayer portion and a delightful stress reliever of a single player game, as it stands we can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t cancel your HL2 and DoomIII pre-order for the time being and make your way to the nearest retail outlet and purchase Painkiller immediately.

Discuss the Painkiller review in the Forums

IC-Games RSS Feed

IC-Games Reviews and Previews (c) 2002-2007

Designed by James Collins

To have your product featured contact The Editor
Found some news? contact The News Desk
PR Dept - Andrew St.Denis
Additional Coding by James Collins and Phil Douglas
Get credited, submit breaking news at The News Desk
Want to hire one of our journalists? Enquire here
Want to see your advert on site? Enquire here

Ic-games.co.uk banner Ciao.co.uk

Find the best console offers for the video game lover like Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii and all types of PC games.

Xbox 360 Games

Internet bingo is played by large and a vast amount of gamers, so you’re sure to make a network and friends. Whatever age or gender.