Painkiller

I mentioned Painkiller once some time ago, on my favourite weapons article. In that article, I talked about how much I like the guns in the game, and I might have told a little lie.

See, I like almost all the weapons more than my other picks aside from the SBC Cannon. But then, I can’t just fill most of the list with weapons from the same game, can I? I do stand by my point that the Electrodriver is underwhelming, but the Rocket Launcher/Chaingun combo is pretty much a power fantasy controlled with two buttons. Painkiller, the titular weapon of the game, is a hand-mounted blender that gibs enemies and their corpses. The Shotgun is loud, forceful, and puts most video game shotguns to shame. And of course, the Stake Gun. But I believe I have said enough about it in my previous article.

But the guns are just one part of how the game looks, feels and sounds. The basic premise of the game is that you and your wife died in a car accident. Your wife ascended to heaven, while you were doomed to Purgatory. Later, an angel tasked you to go to Purgatory to stop Lucifer’s uprising. And this premise influences the game’s art design.

Everywhere you look, death and decay permeates your surroundings. The environment is murky, rotting, and covered with filth, either stains since time immemorial or freshly-shed blood from the minions of Lucifer that you’ve slain. The world is grim, unforgiving, where lost souls devoid of God’s love wander in a land that was wounded and weary. There is a bleak beauty laced with sadness, where everything feels cold and lifeless. Any resemblance your surroundings have with the world of the living just seems to be mocking you when it is utterly and completely dead.

When there is no one left but you as you walk to the next arena, there is a slow, steady and rhythmatic thu-thump sound, like the heartbeat of a man who just survived fighting for his life and is the last one standing. Which is absolutely ridiculous because you are also dead, unless souls condemned to Purgatory get to keep their pulse. But I digress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sDXbwg_Z0

And the weapons, your only form of interaction with this world, is an extension of the environment as much as it is an extension of yourself. They are tools of death and destruction, reducing the only ones alive, demons, to corpses in a world already lacking in life. But they also look like something that belongs in the environment. Dull, rough, brutal and graceless, they nonetheless have a beauty about them. Every weapon is as intricate as they are deadly, with many little mechanisms moving about with every shot. The sound of blades slicing through the air, the loud, explosive blast that propels every pellet forward, every aspect of the guns are lovingly crafted so that they feel like they belong in this rotting, putrid land.

 

And of course, gameplay. It’s the Serious Sam/ Doom style of gameplay, where all there is are mobs for you to kill and a point for you to get to. Okay, there’s a perk mechanic, secret collectibles and a soul harvesting system where getting a set number of souls will let you enter a demon mode where you kill everything and dies to nothing. But in the end, the game is about killing demons, and it does that well.

Lucifer’s army is formed by many different demons, with ninjas, clowns, undead soldiers, old crones and skeleton knights. So many different mobs, with different mechanics and lovingly detailed looks. For example, one particular mob in the early levels can throw a fireball that essentially silences you, making you unable to fire your gun. And that particular mob can absolutely go to Hell.

And the arenas you face them are as varied as they are, from a decrepit graveyard to a large steel bridge spanning across a snowy mountain range. When you face an enemy, the level’s track starts playing, as you begin another fight in an almost futile attempt to bring down Lucifer’s forces.

Lastly, the UI. I rarely talk about them or even pay much attention to them, but the UI for this game deserves some attention just for how nice it looks!

It’s a rather simple UI, nothing fancy, but much like the game it was presented with a lot of care and style. In other words, it looks pretty and it works.

Although I do have a minor nitpick. Take a look at the level select screen:

It looks really, really nice, but it took me some time to figure out that the red glowing gem is the “play level” button, since there is no indication of that whatsoever. While the level select menu looks awesome, I must deduct some marks for that.

And speaking of deducting marks, the cutscenes. Just give it a miss. It’s … bad.

Overall, I really enjoy this game. Its atmosphere, gameplay and art really made it for me. It would’ve been perfect if not for the truly awful and awfully long cutscenes, but at least there’s an option to skip it. I strongly recommend this game, and besides, it’s on sale every Christmas, so give it a shot.