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Painkiller Review
April 26, 2004 Jakub Wojnarowicz

Summary: DreamCatcher Interactive and People Can Fly are bursting onto the scene with their first really big title, Painkiller: Heaven's Got a Hitman. Promising back-to-basics singleplayer and Quake-inspired multiplayer, what couldn't we love? Imagine fast multiplayer with no footsteps, no pause in switching weapons and possibly the WORST starting gun ever... oh heck, read on to find out.


OverviewPage:: ( 1 / 5 )
When I previewed Painkiller a few short months ago, I felt an incredible promise in the multiplayer but didn’t think the singleplayer aspect was at all inspired. Yes, the big bosses are cool, but they’ve been done before and the levels seemed scarcely capable of being less interesting. After all, you walk into an area, get locked off, kill anything that moves, and walk into the next area.

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Of course, it’s somewhat unfair to make that characterization – any game, when distilled down to its most basic elements, can be summed up in one boring sentence. Yet from the alpha and even the demos, there seemed to be little hope for the singleplayer aspect of Painkiller. You’d keep your range from your enemies and kill them. Get mobbed, and you’d die, but otherwise you were generally fine until the boss fight.

However, prolonged exposure has led me to re-think my earlier presumptions about the game. The singleplayer is fun. Simple, yes, but not necessarily simplistic. Like a good puzzle game or arcade shooter, on lower difficulty levels you start to develop your own challenges. “How can I get through this section without using too much ammo or health? How many gold coins and souls can I collect?” It is, in the words of Warren Spector, emergent gameplay. This style of play is spurred by the challenges put forth in the level selection screen, which say that you need to collect X souls or Y gold, or finish with at least Z kills while in demon mode.

The player discovers new tricks as he goes along. As you collect tarot cards (power ups) by completing the challenges, you look at the cost of placing these cards – often in the hundreds of gold coins – and wonder just how you’ll ever be able to afford it. Then, in a random fight with a lot of rocket fire, you might spot a strange looking gold coin on the ground. You pick it up and wonder how it appeared there. Maybe you ask as a friend, maybe you experiment, but eventually you learn that if you bounce the corpse of a fallen foe three or four times in mid-air, he’ll drop a special coin that’s worth a fortune. Suddenly, in addition to simply killing your foes while collecting the coins from broken items, and souls from dead enemies, you see how much extra gold you can earn with the juggling trick.

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Then you start taking risks in battle, juggling foes before you’re done with their friends, because corpses disappear quickly and you need as much gold as you can. Of course, if you juggle too well, the corpse might be in the air when it decomposes, leaving the soul out of reach. In a simple game like this, it’s much easier to appreciate the subtler gameplay mechanics at work than in a more complex title like Splinter Cell.




SingleplayerPage:: ( 2 / 5 )
I like to think of Painkiller’s singleplayer as a rubix cube – a simple design that combines just a few parts to make an incredible combination. On the surface, it’s a simple shooter which forces you through a collection of zones in a level. Beneath that, there’s of course the basic weapon selection and map management – if you’ve got a horde of 100 monsters after you, grouping them together in a tight area and deploying several grenades is a lot more efficient than firing off 100 stakes. Much deeper are the optional objectives with which you win tarot cards, and the cards themselves, which can extend the lifespan of souls or increase your speed. Finally, there are all the nuances of collecting the souls, the gold, and the tricks like juggling corpses.

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Monsters tend to be simple, rushing towards you or firing their weapons, but they do interact with each other. The flame thrower enemies can set zombie soldiers on fire, who will do more damage in melee. Some skeleton enemies from the first act will lop off the heads of their allies, and spin them like tops, sword out, cutting a swathe towards you. Other enemies will use their allies as meat shields.

Many of the creatures also have a trick to them. To kill a flame thrower wielding foe, you need to hit the flame gun itself. Freaks leave behind souls that take one health from you, rather than give it. Small Vamps have to be gibbed or else they’ll mutate into Big Vamps. There’s more, but it’d be a pity to spoil it.

Each Act consists of five or six levels, one of which has the final boss encounter and the rest are regular levels. On one of the other levels, you have to deal with a mini-boss near the end. Usually the encounter is rather simple, but sometimes – as with the first one – it’s a puzzle and you don’t even know it. The first miniboss is a real pain – because, despite all appearances otherwise, he’s a vampire. He happens to be immune to all your weapons and you need to figure out how to shed some sunlight on him.

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Most of the real bosses are puzzles as well. It’s not just a matter of shooting them, you need to weaken them somehow. The second boss is a perfect example of this, being a watery swamp monster (and a wonderful example of pixel shader technology – remember the Half-Life 2 E3 demo water man? Think that, but f’in huge. -ed.)




Tech, multiplayerPage:: ( 3 / 5 )
Painkiller is quite an attractive game, with a good dynamic lighting system, impressive modeling and quality textures. Animations are detailed but repetitive – enemies rarely have more than one or two attacks. The physics and ragdoll deaths help compensate for this (especially in those delightful instances a stake impales a foe to a wall), but variety remains a problem. Since few levels have more than two or three kinds of enemies, the repetitive animations become glaringly obvious. In any other kind of shooter, such graphical shortcomings would kill the experience. Painkiller is more tolerable thanks to its style of play, thanks to the frequent, grisly mass deaths of your foes and the frantic pace. The game just never leaves you time to think, and when it does, you’re worrying about what’s next rather than what is wrong with the graphics.

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The sound effects are crisp and clean with a strong musical score, which, thank God, has nothing to do with military marches or orchestral soundtracks. After so many World War II, special ops/counter-terrorism and other realistic games, the different music alone is a pleasure to here. Painkiller not only looks and plays completely different from Saving Private Ryan or a Tom Clancy novel, it sounds different, and that’s not a benefit to be underestimated.

Multiplayer

Where singleplayer turned out to be surprisingly pleasant, the multiplayer I found somewhat disappointing. It’s not that the Quake style of play is abhorrent – indeed not after so many years of CS, MoHAA and CoD – and Painkiller faithfully recaptures the feel. The game is fast, footsteps make no sound, maps are designed with gameplay in mind first and realism not at all, there are teleports and strafe jumping and rocket launchers.

Yet, perhaps the expectations were too high. For starters, the netcode isn’t quite as smooth as we might like it. Now we can’t be sure if this isn’t just overloaded servers, but too many online experiences were a frustration due to lag and warping. Another problem is the stake gun – it’s your starting gun. The stake gun launches projectiles at moderately high speed (a touch faster than the Quake rocket launcher), but it reloads very slowly, the stakes drop vertically over time, and it obviously has no splash damage.

Now, combine this weapon with the netcode, and you can imagine the problem. Hitting anyone becomes pot luck. You just fire, and hope that between the time the server knows you fired the stake and the place where you thought your enemy was, an act of divine intervention will occur and you’ll hit. It’s not necessarily this bad, and usually you can get a kill or two before your ammo runs out, but the stake gun is absolutely the worst weapon in the Painkiller arsenal for multiplayer. The namesake painkiller weapon itself is better in many situations.

This problem is all the more remarkable since the designers of the game are supposed Quakeworld fans, and should know why Quakeworld became more popular online than NetQuake – the lag. Why they decided the stake gun is a good starting weapon choice for internet multiplayer is a mystery to us. It should be quite a potent killing tool on LAN, but it’s hard to forgive this design decision.

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Painkiller’s multiplayer is diversified with the addition of many different gameplay modes, like Stakematch which has players fighting only with the stake gun, but these optional play modes are more like Mutators from Unreal Tournament than actual mods. They provide flavor, but they don’t change the basic recipe of the game.

That recipe is simple: fast, silent, lethal. Fights in Painkiller rarely last more than two seconds, and you end up going through dozens of decisions in that crack of time. Where to move, where to aim, whether or not to jump, what weapon to switch to, what weapon mode to use? By the time you’re done, you’re already trying to remember where the health and armor are, and whether or not to pick up your dead opponent’s drop. Then you tune your ears in and listen for sounds like item pickups and jumps, to decide on the safest route to a nearby armor or health with which to replenish yourself. It is the very soul of Quake.



Ballistics ReportPage:: ( 4 / 5 )

Pros

Multiplayer
Imagine Quake with new weapons, new (and damn good) levels, and beautiful graphics.

Singleplayer
It’s surprisingly good. If the description we gave doesn’t sound interesting, it’s probably not for you, but feel free to check out the demos to make sure. The subtle improvements are what must be appreciated.

Graphics and Sound
While not exactly next-generation bleeding edge like Doom III, Painkiller is not far behind. Its technical aspects straddle the middle ground between past and present.

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Cons

Variety
The levels go by quick and have enough of a difference between themselves, but we did get tired of seeing the same two enemies on the same map after a while. Serious Sam and Doom had a clearly better mix of foes.

Lag and stake gun
It may just be our bad luck in picking servers, but we’ve had enough problems to wonder how robust the netcode is. The stake gun as the initial weapon in multiplayer is a boneheaded decision, we wouldn’t even want to use it with UT or Q3A netcode.

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Final VerdictPage:: ( 5 / 5 )

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Being FiringSquad, however, we were more concerned with the multiplayer and came away very impressed, but bleeding from two sore spots. For a game that so faithfully manages to recapture the spirit of Quake, that comes away with good level design (always troublesome) and some very interesting weapons, it’s painful to see the developers make two major mistakes. The stake gun and painkiller are simply useless in multiplayer, and they’re your starting weapons. This is as poorly thought out as id giving the blaster as the weapon in Quake II.

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As fans of the genre and devoted Quake players, People Can Fly should know of the importance of the starting weapons and especially the netcode, which is our other problem. It is vastly improved over what we tested in the alpha, so clearly some thought went to it, but the success rate for good online servers is only 20%. With a figure that low, we must assume this is the developer’s fault.

Got questions or comments on the review or the game? Talk to us about them on the official forums.


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© Copyright 2003 FS Media, Inc.
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