Painkiller (PK) originally caught my eye at last year's E3 conference, primarily because of its great physics and amazing boss monsters. After playing the demo, though, I decided it was a game I wasn't going to buy. Sure it looked good, but its gameplay seemed to be about an inch deep. Run and gun can still be fun in limited doses, but it's not nearly so appealing anymore in light of the other games on the market these days.
So of all the games that I could have won in a contest, it follows naturally, given my luck, that PK was the game I received. You see, there are some video game stores near my home that stock mostly console titles, but I visit them from time to time to see what cheap PC games they have in their bargain bins. I also sign up for all kinds of promotions, and I finally won something after several years of trying. My immediate reaction was greedy (viz., why couldn't I have won Halo instead!?), but my subsequent reaction was more appropriate: never look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's pretty obvious that the developers spent most of their time on the game's visuals. The game looks really good, particularly in terms of its characters. I found many of the enemies to be very impressively animated with great attention to detail. The environments are elaborate, well textured, and chock full of bad guys to shoot. And that's to say nothing of the thousand-foot tall bosses. Sheesh. If you're looking for a game full of neat eye candy, PK delivers an awful lot. I don't think it approaches the beauty of Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004, or some other recent games, but it holds its own nevertheless.
More surprising is that PK plays incredibly well despite all the goodies. I could crank up the resolution to 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp, with all the graphical options maxed out, and still get smooth framerates. And that's with my aging Radeon 9700 Pro video card; I can only assume that the next generation of video cards will provide the same smooth play at 1600 x 1200 and perhaps allow some nice anti-aliasing to boot. Of all the new games I've played of late PK runs the best. I sure can't fault it in that respect; the developers have done a fabulous job of making it look good and run well.
It should also be mentioned that the demon mode is a stunningly beautiful and surreal visual effect. When Daniel morphs into his demonic form, the entire environment is displayed in an overly-bright black and white, while any enemies appear in red. A single shot is enough to blow most enemies to bits in a most spectacular display. The center of the display where the reticule appears even distorts visibly with the demon's power. It's an amazing thing to see.
My one big complaint with the game's visuals is that its cut scenes are pretty bad. The protagonist, Daniel, manages to look completely expressionless, despite the motions of his facial features. Eve's curves are pretty easy on the eyes, to be sure, but she too seems more like a glassy-eyed blow-up doll than a woman. I think the modeling is generally good, but the animation simply isn't believable. Even big-name animation houses like Disney and Pixar have trouble animating human characters, and the developers of PK miss the mark by a far wider margin.
The audio is surprisingly good, particularly in terms of the effects and the overall implementation. I love the spooky sounds and ambient music that play throughout many of the levels, and I love the way all the sounds of battle are positioned so nicely in 3D space. The one big problem is that the music changes when going into battle, switching from wonderfully atmospheric ambience to in-your-face, plodding heavy metal .
I like Van Halen as much as anyone, but I don't think the soundtrack works. The other elements of the game aspire to something better than the terribly repetitive crunchy guitar riffs that leave one feeling as if walking out of a Judas Priest concert after being mugged. It's just not pleasant, particularly when one last elusive enemy remains before the next checkpoint will be available. I spent far too much time listening to some of the annoying soundtrack, and I don't miss it a bit.
In the final battle against Lucifer, for example, the sounds of Hell are absolutely fabulous. But then as soon as battle commences the effect is ruined. Imagine if Peter Jackson had used some cheesy rock band during the final confrontation between Gollum and Frodo; the battle music in PK is just as out of place.
PK's interface is pretty simple because PK itself is pretty simple. The player's primary means of interacting with the world is by shooting it. Most first-person shooter (FPS) games at least let the player crouch, flip switches, collect keys, and what not, but PK doesn't bother with any of these things and therefore needs very few controls. I did like the black tarot card interface, once I grew accustomed to it, and the ability to bind keys to rocket jumping is a nice touch.
Everything else is pretty bland save for one notably bad exception: the save game interface is pretty obscure. It took me a while to figure out that one can't always save a game, and that when one can it's necessary to select the "New Save" option on the list of saves before then pressing the "Save" button. Maybe I'm unobservant or dense, but that wasn't at all obvious to me. It seems like it could use a little work.
The game mechanics could be called "FPS lite" save for the addition of the black tarot cards. As noted already, PK doesn't ask the player to flip switches, collect items, or do pretty much anything but move and shoot, so it's hardly a complicated game. And yet the addition of the black tarot cards provides the player with some interesting incentives and options. Each card is either gold or silver, the former providing benefits that can be activated only once per level and the latter providing passive benefits that are always active. The player must choose which cards to equip up to a maximum of three gold and two silver.
Thus, the player is given incentive to collect the cards, manage them well (insofar as they can turn the tide of a tough battle), and even search out the gold coins needed to place the cards in their slots. It's an interesting and welcome twist on standard FPS game mechanics. The means necessary to obtain some of the cards aren't much fun—about which more in a moment—but the mechanic itself is intriguing.
The other interesting innovation is the demon mode, which is activated with each multiple of 66 souls collected by the player. When an enemy is killed his soul stays behind for a brief time during which the player can collect it. Collecting 66 souls transforms the player into a seemingly invincible demon with unbelievable destructive power. While in this state the player can slaughter enemies with gleeful abandon, tearing them to bloody shreds with minimal effort. It makes for a really neat way of handling some of the more frantic battles if the player is willing to time the acquisition of that 66th soul.
Aside from the above, however, the game mechanics are pretty much what one expects from a FPS game: shoot everything that moves, pick up everything that doesn't, and stay alive. The environments are populated with inanimate objects that blow up, contain gold coins, etc., all of which give the player extra incentive even to blast what doesn't move. The mechanics are very destruction-oriented and that supplies much of the fun.
Maybe it's because I'm a Christian and actually believe in Heaven and Hell—though not purgatory, sorry Catholics—but the story seems pretty lame to me. It's an interesting notion that the game takes place after death. There's nothing like seeing the protagonist of a story die in the first few seconds; it's a great literary device for piquing the viewer's curiosity. But it's all pretty well downhill from there.
Daniel is told that He (i.e., God) needs Daniel to lay the smack down on a bunch of Lucifer's generals to purify himself and earn his way into Heaven. Frankly, I'm surprised the developers were so politically incorrect; were it not for the fact that not many rabid feminists play video games I can only imagine that referring to God as 'He' would be generating a firestorm of accusations of sexism. But I digress. When Daniel is finally offered entrance into Heaven, to be reunited with the wife he loves, he scorns the offer, preferring instead to follow Lucifer into the depths of Hell. Yeah, that makes sense.
I won't give away the ending, but suffice it to say that the plot is lame. The characters are either uninteresting or unbelievable, and the actual content of the game bears far more resemblance to freaked-out modern cities than anything one's nightmares of purgatory and/or hell might hold. It's a story with a lot of potential but little actual success. Fortunately, most folk who play such games won't notice its absence.
First, let's talk about the negative. The environment designs are more than a bit odd in my estimation. I mean, Daniel is trapped in purgatory, right? So shouldn't things look a little more surreal and a little less like architecture out of some contemporary city? The environments in the first mission on the march into Hell looks more like some kind of freaky Venice that never was than anything hellish. I guess I expected a game that takes place post-mortem to be more interesting in its environments, but PK doesn't deliver in that regard. The one exception is the final level, which, while not what I think of when I think of Hell, manages to be pretty wild.
I should also add that the environments seem designed deliberately to hamper the pace of the game. In several of the levels one hears the next checkpoint activate but then has to run down several flights of stairs, retrace previous steps, or just generally hunt for it in order to move forward. In other instances, the player is stuck without any clear visual cues to help him figure out where to go. The opera house at the beginning of episode two had me stuck for almost 20 minutes, for example, until I just started shooting all the walls. Frankly, the red thingy I ultimately destroyed looked like part of the environment and not something one could shoot.
Far worse, though, are the annoying puzzles. To acquire some of the holy artifacts in the game, and/or complete the tasks necessary to unlock a black tarot card, one will have to save and reload a bazillion times thanks to nasty jumping puzzles. In one particular spot the player must climb carefully down a ladder on the side of a bridge, jump into a secret alcove, then jump to two more secret alcoves with roughly zero margin for error in order to collect the three holy artifacts stored in said alcoves.
The player's reward for all that hard work is... that he gets to turn around and repeat it all to get back to the top of the bridge! Yuck. It wouldn't have been so bad, but collecting all the holy artifacts was necessary on that level to unlock one of the best black tarot cards in the game. The very least the developers could have done was to provide some way to exit without having to retrace all that very difficult jumping. I'll say it again: yuck.
Beyond jumping puzzles one also finds annoying boss encounters. I absolutely despise bosses that are either invulnerable or pushovers, all depending on some stupid trick. The first miniboss, a kind of hulking zombie guy who appears on the bridge to a flaming pit, is a perfect example. He's completely invulnerable to all weapons fire. But if you shoot out the ceiling and let a beam of light in, he will die the instant he walks into it. Honest, I am not making this up.
The swamp monster guy is much the same. Once you figure out the trick, that you need to shoot the bubbles in the muck, the whole affair becomes trivial. Simply shoot out all the bubbles and then cream him when he goes to put out the resulting fires. The unbelievably cool-looking boss with the hammer is no different. You're screwed until you figure out you need to shoot his hammer; once that thing is gone he's history in a big hurry. Lucifer himself dies with a single well-timed shot, once the player knows what he's doing. I absolutely hate that kind of crap. The bosses themselves are really neat, but they become complete pushovers once you find the stupid tricks.
Of course, such tricks might be used to cover up the dimwitted artificial intelligence (AI) in the game. Seriously, folks, none of the bad guys have a more sophisticated approach than (1) move to attack range, and (2) attack. It's like DOOM all over again, albeit with much better graphics. Given the sheer numbers of bad guys that attack at once it's probably a good thing they aren't any smarter. But make no mistake: the enemies require ammunition to dispatch, not thought.
The game is also relatively buggy. I ran into several situations in which doors that were supposed to open didn't, which forced me to re-load the game from a previous checkpoint. During my first encounter with one of Lucifer's generals, the Necrogiant simply walked all the way off the map after I had beaten him, which left me entirely unable to continue. Still worse, the game hung when loading several of the levels, and even restarted my computer completely a couple of times despite my running Windows XP. Suffice it to say that PK is not quite ready to be released.
But aside from these flaws there remains some good stuff in PK. I know others have complained, though I don't understand why, but I really liked the arsenal of weapons. I should first explain that each weapon is actually two weapons combined, which effectively doubles the arsenal from five to ten distinct weapons. They are, in their numerical order on the keyboard, the pain/killer, shotgun/freezer, stakegun/grenade launcher, rocket launcher/chaingun, and electro/driver. The pain/killer, for example, consists of pain, the whirling blades activated by primary fire, and killer, the secondary projectile that can be launched into walls and then connected via a destructive beam of light to pain.
This approach to weapon design is really quite refreshing. A complaint I've lodged against many other games is that certain weapons simply become useless after a time, but that is surely not the case in PK. The pain/killer weapon in particular is very flexible, in no small part because the weapon has hidden functions waiting for the player to discover. I really enjoyed trying to use it alone in some of the big battles, simply because of its versatility. One can simply fire up the blades and wade into the enemy, use alternate fire in rapid succession as a surprisingly lethal attack, shoot killer into a nearby wall and dice enemies in the energy beam that emanates from pain when pointing at killer, or even whip up the blades and hit alternate fire to send it flying forward for what is usually a one-shot kill. It's really quite a nifty weapon, and I applaud the developers' imaginations for coming up with it.
The shotgun/freezer is similarly neat, providing the perfect way to take down some of the bigger, tougher enemies with a two-shot combo. The stakegun is itself wonderfully primitive and all the more satisfying because of the great physics in the game—blast some bad guy in the shoulder with the stakegun at close range and you'll see what I mean—and its grenade launcher can be used in tandem with it for crackshot players who can hit grenades in flight. It's a nifty effect, though probably not all that practical for most combat. The rocket launcher/chaingun combo is easily the coolest weapon ever featured in a FPS game and even the electro/driver has its uses, though I was constantly running out of ammunition for it. Suffice it to say that the arsenal of weapons is far more interesting and versatile than in most other FPS games.
The bestiary of opponents is similarly interesting and varied. I counted no less than 26 different enemies in the game, and while all of them have the same simplistic AI they have a number of different methods of attack. I particularly liked the way some of the enemies interact with each other, the skulls picking up hell bikers to use as shields, the leper monks hurling the bodies of other enemies at you, etc. PK has some of the neatest enemies I've seen yet in a FPS game.
Best of all there's some substance to the game. I finished it the first time in roughly fifteen hours of play, so that's relatively quick. But I didn't unlock many of the black tarot cards at all, and I found even fewer of the secrets. The secret areas in PK are bloody difficult to find as far as I'm concerned. And since I discovered some of the super-cool weapon combos pretty late in the game (e.g., activate the electro beam and then fire the driver's shurikens down it for killer damage), I could probably play through it all again just to play around with some of the stuff I missed. The developers even give you a cut scene at the beginning of each chapter, much like games from Blizzard, so there's a fair amount of "meat" to PK. It's not the best gaming value I've ever seen, but it's not nearly as light on content as some other games.
I thought the original Quake was terrible about spawning you right in front of enemies; PK makes it look amateur by comparison. After the initial half-dozen spawn deaths in my very first multi-player deathmatch game I started keeping score. The longest streak I suffered was no less than 17 instant deaths because people were camping nearby with the rocket launcher/chaingun. The weapons are just too screwed up to be useful in multi-player contests.
The pain/killer, so versatile and useful in the single-player campaign, is largely useless. The shotgun/freezer is marginally better. The stakegun/grenade launcher is over-the-top powerful, but you've got to have essentially perfect aim to use it. The result is pretty predictable: guys with the rocket launcher/chaingun and electro/driver kill everybody else. Period. This makes the free for all (FFA) and team deathmatch (TDM) modes pretty pointless and uninteresting in my experience. I guess it's marginally entertaining to be the guy with the rocket launcher, but it's a bit like clubbing baby seals for the most part.
The people-can-fly (PCF), voosh (V), and light-bearer (LB) modes of play are a bit more interesting. PCF is just plain weird, insofar as players can be damaged only when they're in the air. It makes for some crazy and frustrating games, but it is useful for working on leading one's targets. LB is even more unbalanced than FFA or TDM in that the guy carrying the powerup is a killing machine; the only thing that makes it fun is that every other player naturally gangs up on him.
But my favorite multi-player mode has got to be V, which gives every player the same weapon (and infinite ammunition), changing all the weapons in play at random intervals. It's a serious hoot to be chasing somebody with the pain/killer when rocket launcher/chaingun comes into play. True, it makes for some pretty short battles, but it really keeps players on their toes. It's pretty wacky to have the weapons switch in the middle of fights, and it helps keep things interesting.
Overall, the multi-player aspect of the game is somewhat entertaining. It's fast and furious, involving nothing but running and gunning. But it's definitely not the kind of game that's going to keep your attention for months, well, unless you've got a really dull imagination. The bottom line is that too many other games provide a more interesting multi-player experience.
Overall, PK is a decent game. It certainly isn't a great game, and it's questionable whether it's even a good game in light of the various problems I've mentioned. It's a largely mindless shoot-em-up that asks a lot, really, to get the most out of it by collecting all the black tarot cards. Still, it has high-quality production values and can be pretty entertaining if one is looking for a lot of frantic, high-octane action blasting the bad guys.
Because I got the game for free, I easily got my money's worth. If old-school FPS games really excite you, then PK should probably be on your short list of must-buy games. If you're a gamer who prefers their FPS games with a bit more substance, then you probably shouldn't spend any more than about $15 on PK; wait for it to come down in price. For everyone else, I would suggest playing the demo instead. PK is like a cake with rich, chocolate frosting. It's really yummy at first, but it doesn't make much of a meal at all.
04/30/2004