Painkiller is a series I’ve certainly heard of, but I couldn’t tell you either way whether or not I’ve played it. I must have at some point, I’m sure, because I played every single thing I could get my hands on, but I can’t actually remember doing so. What I do remember that it’s similar to Doom, including all the hellish monsters and environments. You enter a room, kill a legion of monsters, then move onto the next room, where another legion awaits your bullets. This co-op reboot of this two decade old series gets this right, at least, but it’s a bit uninspired because of this.
We will start with the good stuff. Painkiller looks pretty good, the environments are cool in that heavy metal album cover sort of way, full of large ominous bits that trigger the imagination. The music, whilst perhaps a little on the generic side of metal background tunes, does its job of getting the blood pumping whilst you’re wading through demons well enough.
The best part of the game is the gunplay, gun customisation, and traversal though. There are a few guns here, though not nearly as many as you’d hope, but the two starting weapons are real highlights. The first is a stake gun, which shoots a large wooden spike and can be upgraded to pierce through enemies or shoot three stakes at a time, both of which make it incredibly satisfying to use. The second gun fires shurikens that bounce off surfaces and can be upgraded to ricochet off enemies into others nearby and is, again, incredibly enjoyable once you’ve got an upgrade.
The unlockable weapons include slightly more standard weapons like a shotgun, an SMG, a handcannon, and a rocket launcher, but with similar, very powerful upgrades that make them enjoyable to use. That said, after using the stake thrower with the three stakes upgrade, it felt a lot like using the shotgun once I unlocked it, and the stake thrower with the impaling upgrade feels quite a bit like the handcannon.
These guns also have a secondary fire which, when used on bigger enemies with proper health bars, will fill up their stun meter. Once that’s full, you can charge over and completely obliterate them with your one remaining weapon: the Painkiller. It’s effectively a chainsaw, even if it’s more of a spinning shuriken on a stick, and in addition to shredding anything that comes near it, it also generates ammo from enemies it kills. This is handy, of course, because you’re in deep trouble if you run out of ammo when one of the bigger enemies turns up. Clever use of the Painkiller, which has a cooldown for use without stunning an enemy first, and secondary fire can very quickly shred through a bigger enemy’s health bar, which is very satisfying to do.
As for traversal, you can’t sprint, but you can slide. Functionally this works very similarly but is faster when going down hill, slower when going up hill, and knocks enemies out of the way in a comical fashion when there’s a lot of them around. You also have a dodge button, which has two charges that each have a cooldown, that also knocks enemies out of the way. The combination of this movement system and powerful, creative weapons is a great one, making you feel truly powerful even whilst you’re desperately fighting for your life against a horde of beasties. It really can be enjoyable whilst you’re in the thick of all the chaos. One issue in traversal is grapple points not triggering when they should, or sometimes missing your enemy with the Painkiller, which is strange and can catapult you off ledges.
It’s a shame, really, that nothing else in the game lives up to these features. Level design is dull and generic, relying strongly on the kind of mechanics you see in an MMO, like killing enemies within a certain area, or around a barrel that collects their blood that can be shoved into a socket to progress once filled. Or perhaps that totally different mechanic where the barrel collects souls instead. These mechanics even turn up in boss fights, which are messy to say the least and sometimes devolve into frustration.
There are the most basic of basic puzzles dotted through the levels that require two people to get through occasionally – i.e. one to stand on a button and one to go through the door it opens, which usually have a cache of “loot,” if you can call it that as there’s really only four options, gold, health, ammo, and a lure that attracts enemies until they’ve depleted its health.
There are four characters, but beyond their designs – especially Void who seems to have a starfield for a face – and some brief dialogues between them during gameplay, they’re not particularly interesting mechanically or storywise. They each have a particular stat boost that is small enough to be nearly irrelevant, and the story here is almost non-existent. You are in purgatory for various crimes, but Metatron (the biblical voice/scribe of god) offers you a way out, by stopping the fallen angel Azazel from unleashing his demonic hordes onto Earth. You do this by fighting them across three areas, each split into three levels with a boss, and then Azazel. That’s the whole game.
There’s also a tarot card system that mostly seems superfluous because, whilst you’re still unlocking and upgrading your weapons, you spend the resources on doing that, and once you’re done upgrading your weapons, you’ve got little-to-no game left to use them in. The cards can give you useful bonuses such as increased health, quicker secondary fire regen, but I barely used them because they use the same resources to unlock and, once you’ve used a card once, it’s burnt and you have to restore it using the same resources. Not if you died or failed a level whilst using it, just every single time you use it.