Played on:
Windows
2004 promises to deliver many great first person shooters. We've already check out excellent games like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry; highly-anticipated favorites like Half-Life 2 and DOOM 3 are still on the way. Despite these big-name titles, a few smaller game developers are pushing forward with their own unique takes on the FPS genre. One of these companies is People Can Fly - with Painkiller they promise great graphics, highly visceral and frantic action, and some old-school gameplay that'll remind everyone of the Quake days.
Painkiller uses a custom engine that can deliver a ton of polygons as well as excellent textures at great speeds. There are a few advanced pixel shader effects that show up when you are hit or when you turn into a demon, but the more impressive stuff has to do with the art and animations. Add on, though, the speed of the game and the consistency of its frame rate, and this game starts to look much better than the sum of its parts.
While playing online, I did notice that a low ping is pretty much a requirement for making Painkiller really fun. The client side prediction didn't seem so great, so anything over a 50ms ping just didn't feel right. When I did find servers with a nice ping, though, it was a really fun, unique experience compared to today's slow-paced multiplayer shooters.
Other than a copy protection issue that's already been fixed in a patch, I found basically no major bugs in Painkiller. The game ran great on my Athlon, Pentium 4, and my Centrino-based laptop as long as I didn't try and jack up the resolution too much.
People Can Fly are obvious fans of Quake. I can tell this by a few basic things in Painkiller that I haven't seen in first person shooters in a couple of years now. First, switching weapons is absolutely instant. Next, the game allows you to "bunny hop" to gain speed, mimicking Quake 2's strafe jumping while simplifying it a bit for the masses.
The game's multiplayer interface was decent, but dedicated players will probably still find some good reasons to use GameSpy, All-Seeing Eye, or any of the other server browser tools. One other unique aspect of Painkiller is its tarot cards system, where you can unlock and use specific cards to get special abilities for future levels. The interface that allows you to pick these cards seemed a bit convoluted at first, but I figured it out before long.
What impresses me most about Painkiller's graphics is the art. While the game shows a few brilliant moments as far as architecture or monster design, the textures are where the game shines graphically. Each level has a vastly different theme from the previous one, although most of the enemy types you come across carry across several levels. Still, People Can Fly did an excellent job separating each level and making each one feel very distinct. The levels span various ages in human history as well, and they're all almost equally good.
The enemies will come at you in droves, much like the Serious Sam games. The best part is that they look great, even when there are 25 of them on screen at once. The animations for the monsters are excellent - especially the grisly death scenes you can orchestrate with various explosive weapons.
The game includes various cutscenes to tell the story, but it's pretty much completely forgettable and the cutscenes themselves are not particularly well-done either. You'll miss very little if you skip every cutscene in the game, as it has little to do with the action.
Painkiller takes what is becoming a formula for the "frantic first person shooter" sub-genre and adds onto it in several ways. Much like you'd expect, you'll blast through hordes of enemies in one large area only to move on to the next area to do the same thing. The bosses are absolutely massive, but here, you'll need to figure out a specific trick to beat them - this is the closest we see to puzzles in the whole game. Where Painkiller really breaks new ground is in its tarot cards system, where a special goal must be attained to unlock these cards. You can then purchase the cards with the money you've picked up throughout the levels - and you'll likely need to use these to gain access to other cards in the later maps.
