Great graphics?! Did we play the same game?
User Rating: 3.3 | Painkiller PC
Another cool FPS sounded... well, cool, so I tried this one out, although I had not heard much about it. At least not compared to the mammoth FPS releases of 2004, like Half-Life 2, Doom III etc. The back story seems to be about a guy who kills evil things, and there are all these symbols and stuff, like pentagrams. Ok, so that setup is getting a bit old but oh well who cares, on with the killing of things. The gaining of weapons as you progress through the game is a classic, confirmed and tested way of creating an FPS. Still you seem to already have your whole arsenal handy from the start in this one. I think this way of doing it sucks because the whole sense of discovery and learning a new weapon when you get them in sequence as you progress, is lost completely. In games like Painkiller you figure out which weapon is the best and then you stick with that. Not very fun, is it. The graphics are praised by the other reviewers here, but don't trust them too quickly, or when playing the game you're gonna be sorely disappointed. In fact, to my trained eyes they look awful, they look even *worse* than an old game like Quake II for example. And it gets worse even still, because considering the graphics are simple and boring they still chop and lag like nobody's business even on my 3.2 ghz with a good graphics card! Half-Life 2, Doom III, Far Cry and so on run like a dream, games that have much more advanced and better graphics! Painkiller has a heart attack as soon as the next gang of enemies teleport unto the area. I think the gameplay for Wolfenstein 3D, Id's extremely early FPS with by today's standards completely outdated graphics, is way better than the way this game plays. Point your gun and shoot the bad guys and then move to other area. Repeat from step one. The tired old way of playing that many accuse Doom III of having, this game suffers badly from partly since it has none of the atmosphere or scares of said game by Id software. Personally I think Doom III has excellent gameplay, but this is just what most reviewers complained about in that game. Worth mentioning is also that the character you play as in this game walks like John Cleese in the episode of Fawlty Towers where he impersonates a fascistic German soldier by his walk. It's very strange. Stay away from this game and play a good FPS instead. 
