Painkiller Review - Sphinx's Sanitarium

Straight Jacket Type Fun

Painkiller

Screenshots 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

It's important every so often to cleanse one's palette. Similar to how Jules quenches his thirst after tasting a delicious Kahuna burger, a gamer needs to let his mind relax after a lot of hardcore online gaming. Sure, we all love getting on a voice chat service and discussing team tactics for games like Rainbow Six or Wolfenstein and hunting for scrims on IRC and playing till the wee hours. Games such as those have helped form a sense of community in many online circles that otherwise wouldn't exist and continue to bring even the most jaded of gamer back online for "just a few minutes" to only realize it's well after midnight and you still don't have a game review written for your site. But if current, more complex shooters are the tasty burger in a meal, games like Painkiller represent the cool refreshing drink you take to get you ready for the next delicious morsel of the main course.

Let me rephrase that in a more concise, less clichéd way. Twitch shooters are still relevant and needed. I am not suggesting though that programmers should trash their entire story driven shooters and just add more baddies. That'd be stupid and quite bland. But every once in a while it feels good at some sort of primal level to just unleash continuous rounds of double barrel buckshot into hordes of minions who's simple little minds have only one goal in mind: devour you for supper and use your stomach as a bagpipe for after dinner entertainment.

Painkiller answers the Neanderthal need to just wreck stuff. Forget tactics, teamplay, and covering fire. Turn off the Ventrilo or TeamSpeak client. Shut down the IRC client or instant messengers. If your buddies ask where you're going just tell 'em, "I got this one team. I just need to handle this one alone." In the same vein as Serious Sam and the original Quake series, Painkiller wants you to embrace your basic gamer need to shoot first and ask questions later. Well, why bother asking questions later, just shoot first.

So basically it comes down to if you like the twitch fest style of gameplay? I sure do and let me tell you why I like twitch games and relate that back to Painkiller.

First, after playing in competitive leagues (CAL, TWL, OGL [which is sorta competitive.. hah]) for going on two years now, having a chance to just completely drop the need to meet with others, get into scrims, or work on communication is something I welcome every once in a while. With a game like Painkiller, you simply find the weapons, find the doors, and get right down to business in the given environment. And the business of course is to decimate the enemy and emerge victorious from the level, the sloshing of blood and demon entrails around your boots letting you know that you're still alive and ready to dish out more punishment.

To dispense one's righteous wrath in Painkiller, you're given a total of five weapons and while all the weapons prove worthy throughout the entire game, in the end it's your trusty double barrel shotgun which serves a player best. Like it always does, the double barrel (in combination with it's alternate fire mode) allows you to cut huge swaths of punishment on your enemies and with plenty of ammunition lying around a person could conceivably go the entire game with using little else than the double barrel. But then you'd be denying yourself the chance to use the stake gun for impaling opponents into walls, or the hybrid rocket launcher-chain gun. It's a true delight to run up on the enemy and unload your weapons point blank into them and watch as their bodies go flying backwards dozens of feet, arms and feet flailing around, often knocking some of their companions to the floor as well.

In fact, I'd go as far to say that the physics in the game are some of the best I've ever seen. A lot of other reviews have discussed the rag doll physics. I'd hazard to guess that the stake gun was created for this game just to show off how well the physics engine was devised. When you shoot a bad guy with a stake the enemy is blown off their feet and fly backwards, arms and legs still pointed at you until they slam into a wall at which time their arms suddenly hit the wall and fall down limp. How do they do that? I don't know but it's amazing. Sure it's all a little (well ok, a lot) over the top but what's wrong with that sometimes?

As for the overall graphics, I must say these are some of the most eye pleasing textures I've seen yet in a game. In fact, let me just ask where'd all the great textures come from lately? Wolfenstein has them, Athena Sword possesses in my opinion the best textures I've ever seen in a shooter, and now Painkiller has some textures, both on the characters and the surfaces, that look almost real enough to touch.

Areas to fight vary between huge and small and both run great. Fantastically great even. It appears the developers simply devoured all they could regarding first person shooter levels and threw it in here. There's the standard ones we've come to expect such as a graveyard, a shipyard, and the remote castles, but others which are a little more inspired are included such as the insane asylum, a train station full of WWI undead, and some sort of cross dimensional rift which I can only assume is probably Hell. Or Cleveland. Whichever it's pretty twisted. However, the weapons you carry seem to have finite range rather than infinite range with rockets exploding in mid-air towards a distant target or other rounds not appearing to impact at all. An engine limitation for the game? Perhaps.

The only really big downside of this game regards the lack of co-operative play. It's not a make or break issue in Painkiller since the enemies are not coming at you 300+ at a time such as a Serious Sam game but it would be fun.