Painkiller
So I bought painkiller off of steam in January and was really looking forward to playing it ever since playing the demo, but some parts of the game really annoyed me.
Painkiller is a hexen style shooter with lots of bad guys and very little plot. While I love games with a good plot, I was willing to overlook the lack of plot because I wanted to play a mindless shooter at the time.
The plot, basically, is that you and your girlfriend/wife died in a car crash. Your wife went to heaven, but you went to purgatory. God wants you to go and kill satan’s generals for him, since they are invading purgatory.
Obviously the generals are the bosses. The bosses in the game are, in my opinion, the best part about the game, and what saves it from being a bad game. In between the bosses you just keep on fighting endless hoards of guys.
Here’s the first boss you encounter, the necro giant:
Although the continuous killing through the various levels was fun, it started to get old towards the end. I felt there should have been more mini bosses to break up the monotony. But plot and mindless killing aside, my biggest annoyance with the game were the black taro card unlocks.
Black taro cards are power ups that you can enable once per level. They add damage, slow down the world, make you shoot faster, and give other various benefits. The gold cards give you the one time power up and the silver cards work all the time. There are some cards that allow you to use the gold cards more than once. I like the use of the black taro cards. I think they make the game more fun and are useful when you get in tight spots. But, I am annoyed with how you unlock the cards.
In a game where you get a bunch of overpowered weapons, black taro cards, as well as a demon morph mode that makes you invincible and kill most thing with one hit, it makes no sense to force the player to limit themselves just to unlock the black taro cards. Some of the more annoying tasks are finding all the secret areas, finding all the holy items, avoiding collecting any souls, killing all enemies (I’ll explain why this is annoying in a sec), defeating level without using any armor, picking up every ammo box, and avoiding all damage. The find the secret areas/holy items/hidden areas tasks are annoying because some of the secret areas are impossibly hard to get, like on one level where you have to bunny hop up a mountain side in a weird way just to get the secret. Usually to get all the secrets you have to back track after beating the level just to get to areas that were blocked off before. And besides, this game is fun for the killing aspect, not for spending a bunch of time tracking down and trying with difficulty to reach the secret areas. The train station level is covered with solders that run at you in droves, making it very difficult and very annoying to have to avoid getting every soul to unlock the card. On the military base level you have to kill every enemy, which seems like no big deal, but if you missed one of the optional areas or buildings that you might not to think to look in, you can’t go back, even after the level is completed. The monsters will only appear the first time. On babel you have to pick up every ammo box. This one isn’t as annoying as the others, but it still distracts you from having fun just plowing through the level, killing everything.
I realize that some people like to do every single thing in a game. Find every secret, get every armor, every ammo box, and beat every difficulty, but I don’t and I suspect that most gamers don’t. I want to play through a game once, have a good time while doing it, and then move on to the next great game. My comment about beating all the difficulties brings me to my other annoyance; locked levels.
If you play the game on normal, you can’t play two of the levels. Even if you start the game on hard (nightmare) you still don’t have all the levels unlocked. In order to play all the levels, you would have to play through the game at least twice, which I don’t have the motivation to do. I like to play games to experience what the game has to offer and I don’t want to have to replay the entire game again, just to see something I couldn’t get to the first time.
So that’s my brief review/rant about painkiller. Overall I would say that if you don’t have anything else to play right now, painkiller is still a pretty good game and I would recommend it, just keep in mind what I had to say before you play.
I should note that I really like some of the new weapons they added in the expansion. It’s nice to have a machine gun/flame thrower and a 4 bolt cross bow with zoom/flak grenade launcher. And they added a level that I have absolutely fallen in love with: The Dead City. This level is what the whole game should have been like. It has a dark stormy sky, creepy buildings, zombies that run at you and explode, exploding cars, zombies that puke on you from buildings, giant mechanical spiders, man sized flying bugs that throw molotov cocktails, zombies that are thrown off of buildings that splat on the ground just to reform seconds later, as well as a mall area, and an area with two overweight guys with meat cleavers that throw cars at you….with their mind.
