Painkiller (2004)

Painkiller is kind of Serious Sam with an Undying/Marilyn Manson filter. The soundscape especially is unrelenting - constant chanting and spooky noises and gunfire and howls and RAWK. It keeps up the horror tradition of trying to have scary menus.

The opening cut-scene was fine, apart from being a bit oblique; it pretty much matches Far Cry's in quality (except for that game's opening one which is an amazing mix of time-bending, camera-wheeling and abstract nightmare montage).

I played the first level. I like the enemy designs - I got creeped out by the old hags the first time I saw one - and all the death effects are quite nice.

I might need to find the manual to understand the weapons because there are already a couple of fire modes I don't understand...

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Painkiller is feeling like a bit of a chore, to be honest. I don't think I'm so much into the bullet hell FPSes like this and Serious Sam. I'll keep going in them until I hit an annoying bit and then give up. I think I've actually hit that already with the swamp monster boss. The bosses are annoying bullet-sponges in general, but this one requires you to shoot temporary bubbles when they appear near the boss and I've only managed to get it to happen twice ever. I checked a walkthrough and there doesn't seem to be anything I'm missing. So I maaaay give up on this game already. I'll see how I feel when I come back to it. The cheesy atmosphere/enemy design is cool and shooting enemies with the ice-gun is always fun, but it's not enough to rescue this from being a slog.

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I got past that boss and luckily glitched my way through another one that would probably have led me to give up on the game, as it has some stupidly harsh and unavoidable fall damage. I actually got right up to the end of game boss, but I couldn't figure out the trick, so I watched a video of it instead (you have to shoot the meteors into Lucifer).

The final level setting was really cool - lots of different battles from different eras frozen in time. It's a shame the rest of the game wasn't so inventive. It had its moments, like the Ghost Rider guys who grab nearby enemies and use them as shields, but the essentially real-world locations and general grimdark feel mean this game isn't as memorable as Serious Sam. Oh, and the inter-level cut-scenes are as dreadful as people were saying! Pointless, interminable, and ugly, with so many misread lines, plus they feature Eve (yes, that one) looking like a default Unity naked female model but with a hair bra (which, bizarrely, you can see right through anyway).

I think another reason this felt like a bit of a slog was that the weapons, as per usual with these games that have a big wacky selection, weren't very satisfying or well-balanced on the whole. If they'd reduced the stake-gun reload time and given it the secondary freeze mode, they could have got rid of every other weapon except the chain-gun (with its rocket launcher secondary mode).

Rating: Orange.