In recent years, the PC market became increasingly dominated by semi-realistic first person shooters. More complex games are emerging, and doom clones are commonly regarded as repetitive and stale. But that doesn't stop People Can Fly from developing Painkiller. You are not going to rescue any hostages, you are not going to capture any key installations. Painkiller is run and gun of the purest form. The gameplay is basic. You are put into a level, and PCF will release monsters after monsters at you. The action is well pace, and you won't feel the game coming to a sudden stop because of the lack of monsters to kill, or the lack of goodies to grab. It's part of the level design, PCF puts a lot of effort into the maps of the game, monsters spawn point are always very well thought out, and ammos and golds are well scattered throughout the levels. There's a lot of different style of maps in the game, you will be fighting in palace, forest, prison. These variety of environment being very different in architectural structure often plays differently from each other. Painkiller have a few, but pretty exciting selection of weapons. All of them are actually dual mode, but some actually have three modes of attacks. The stakegun can launch fast moving stakes at enemies, but it's also a grenade launcher. You can actually stake your own grenades to launch a powerful large splash damage projectile at enemies to compensate for the lack of rocket launcher in the begining of the game. So despite the small number of weapons, there's a lot of ways to kill. And what PCF have done very well is there's a weapon for every situation in the game; A product of a well balance single player weapons. But in my opinion, the best part of Painkiller are easily the boss fights. They are always massive, brutal, and their designs are creative. Some bosses are standard shoot to kill procedures, but certain requires you to find they weakness in order to put an end to them. It's really a style of play that went missing in PC FPS which is probably due to the lack of shooters of such genre. My complaint about Painkiller is that the game gets kind of easy compared to shooters of it's kind, such as Serious Sam: Second Encounter. Quakeworld bunny hopping is way to easy to pull off as all you have to do is to hit space and repeat, hence players are granted a lot of speed to avoid all of the melee enemies in the game. The hopping is cool, just that it's too easy to do compared to quake series. Other than the minor nitpick. Painkiller is a game that although doesn't have a lot to offer, it's just plain fun once the action gets going. Complete the game on the highest difficulty and you'll even get an alt ending.
as a self-professed, moderately oldschool pc gamer faced with a world filled with increasingly convoluted first person shooters, it's easy for me to feel rather alienated sometimes. given that i grew up on such primitive... Read Full Review
Painkiller is labeled by the critics as old-school, a simple FPS that's well put together and does the job well. I think the critics missed quite a few highly-noticeable facts about this game. Painkiller is at its six... Read Full Review
