Painkiller Demo

A few years ago, shooters were rated by simply measuring the level of violence and fun presented on screen, while the rest of the elements barely got any attention at all, such as the story or the characters themselves. Hence, games like Quake and Doom were highly acclaimed, mainly because of the actual shooting they contained.

Painkiller is a first-person shooter that tells the story of Daniel Garner, an ordinary man who happens to lose his life in a car accident and he's on his way to the final judgment, before he is sent to either heaven or hell. However, his heaven ticket turns out to come with a catch and things soon start to get out of hand, since Daniel is required to play his role in stopping an inevitable holy war.

As such, it is your duty to kill hordes of hell spawns and purify your soul, in order to gain access to heaven and stop the holy war from destroying both worlds in the process. Although it might not sound like much, that's basically the plot of the game and it never really makes any effort to explain it any further, unless you are able to pinpoint character growth and conflict resolution in the rockets that fly around the monster-infested levels.

There's barely any time for plot twists, however, since you are constantly trying to shoot five things at once and stay alive at the same time, using a wide variety of big and powerful weapons to do so. Starting from the regular shotgun and rocket launcher, all the way to guns that shoot stakes and impale the enemies into the nearby walls, everything was designed to be as gruesome and entertaining as possible.

Naturally, this type of game would not be complete without the mandatory boss fights, all which have one thing in common: the monsters are huge and they are very difficult to kill. Some of them have a few weak points that make things easier, but that doesn't mean you can get away too quickly or have any spare ammo after the fight. The graphic quality is more than decent, which allows for smooth animations and detailed character models.

In the end, Painkiller does have some flaws as well, especially when it comes to gameplay. While the linearity can be disregarded as being part of this specific genre, the scripts that control how and when a door opens can be very frustrating, especially when they stop functioning correctly, or when you fail to find a certain mob in order to complete the level. However, all things aside, Painkiller manages to bring back a bit of the golden age back to your screen and it would be a shame to overlook it.