Painkiller Preview
2004 will be a strong year for first person shooters as the release dates of major titles like Half-Life 2 & DOOM 3 loom close. But on top of this, there are quite a few solid-looking shooters on the way from developers that are a little lesser known; one example of these is People Can Fly's Painkiller.
Painkiller has an almost Diablo-like story and atmosphere in a first person environment with frantic, bloody action in the vein of Serious Sam. Unlike Sam, though, this game lacks the goofy one-liners, and has its own unique style that you might just really get into. Other than that, the hordes of similar enemies swarming the player at once, huge bosses, and boatloads of ammo waiting for to be picked up will seem very familiar. Sam has already had one shameless knock-off in Will Rock, but Painkiller tries to do a little more than just vaguely mimic the game that started this recent new subgenre of first person shooters.
The preview version I tried out included three single player levels as well as a couple of multiplayer maps. The game's atmosphere is dark and gothic, and the weapons have an almost steampunk-style to them. The stake-firing crossbow (which doubles as a grenade launcher) has a little pressure gauge on its side, while the combination rocket launcher & chaingun weapon actually has a cooling fan! It sounds kind of stupid, but it looks pretty cool in-game. We also get a rather standard (but very satisfying to use) double shotgun which is plenty of fun. Finally, there is the Painkiller itself, a strange melee weapon that has a chainsaw-style constant attack, but can be also fired out to create a beam between you and whatever wall you stick it to. You can then move around to drag this beam where you want; the beam will hurt or outright kill enemies that walk into it.
The first level in this demo will have you traverse a graveyard and take out hordes of armored, sword-wielding skeletons, wraith-looking witches, and some heavy-set dudes that took a couple of solid shots to take out. Ammo is plentiful, and while this level only included the shotgun and Painkiller to use, presumably we'll have access to a bigger arsenal when this level goes into the full game.
The next map is a medieval town full of corpses, many of which get up to actually dive at the player before hitting the ground again. This level's weapon focus is with the stake crossbow, which was also nice for taking out the axe-throwing zombies roaming around as well. There are also a few minibosses throughout the level that magically send enemy corpses flying at you, which is kind of interesting. The ragdoll physics also made this actually look pretty cool.
The final SP map in this press preview involved a fight with a huge demon-looking boss tower with multiple floors, and there was a bit of a trick to beating him. In this level, you get access to all the weapons, but it turns out the shotgun seemed to be best against him once I ran out of chaingun ammo. Overall, this boss was really fun to fight, but I found it way too difficult to actually avoid his attacks - it seems that People Can Fly knew this too, as I actually ran out of health twice and was magically healed both times. Hopefully they'll be adjusting encounters like this in the next couple of months.
One of the most immediatly obvious differences between Painkiller and Serious Sam is that this game includes ragdoll physics for all of the game's multitudes of enemies. On top of that, the enemies can all be blown away in some pretty gory deaths, with body parts flying everywhere. If you fire a stake someone near a wall, it'll pin them to the wall and the body will hang limply. So far, the ragdoll effects are really exaggerated here, which does wind up giving the game a slightly silly feeling that goes against the game's atmosphere, but it sure was fun to kill enemies like this. Here's a game where over-the-top physics are actually somewhat appropriate - at least, I thought so.
Once you kill enough enemies, your character will go into a very strange (but cool) looking mode where you do extra damage for a little while. Time also slows down a bit in this mode. In multiplayer, this is a powerup you grab instead, and you only get the crazy visuals and extra damage.
The game does include some very hard-hitting sound effects, and the ambience was spooky without being overwhelmingly moody. Overall, I have to give People Can Fly a lot of credit for their sound design so far in Painkiller.
The multiplayer in Painkiller felt a bit more like classic Quake deathmatch than anything else, with tight maps, fast movement, a quad-damage style powerup that's not so easy to get to, armor and weapons that can be controlled by a player with good timing, and teleporters. The teleporters actually display a shimmering image of what the other side looks like, but sadly you can't actually see players moving around or anything moving at all on the other side of the teleporters.
I am fairly impressed by this Painkiller demo. While it was dubbed a multiplayer press build, it included a nice sampling of single player action as well. Of course, advanced AI or high-level strategy are left by the wayside in a game like this, but I don't think anyone can reasonably expect that out of a game with such fast pacing as Painkiller. I'm definitely looking forward to the release of this shooter in early 2004.
