Painkiller

The FPS Genre is getting increasingly complex. Role playing elements, multiple paths, plots, characters...While these innovations strive for a more immersive or cinematic experience, what is often dismissed is the staple ingredient of the most popular game category - shooting bad guys. For this reason, Polish industry new-comer People Can Fly have brought us Doom-esque Painkiller, a back to basics revision of the style of game that resulted in, well, everything.

After an almost sarcastically long introductory FMV, you're deposited into a cemetery for your first impressions. Fair enough. You quickly salvage a shotgun floating cyclicly in the mist and get to blasting the hordes of skeletal soldiers that creep up from the graves around you. In seconds, Painkiller will bring a smile to your face. Cannon fodder enemies blast 15 feet backwards with a single close range shell, garnishing the walls they slide down with detailed animated blood textures. You realise that those first seconds are what the whole game is, and with a smug grin realise you don't even have to reload.

A repetitive core element needs variety in other areas to compensate. People Can Fly certainly haven't failed us there. Military bases, undead villages, warehouses, streets, theatres, asylums and cathedral maps, are each full of unique textures and static meshes. The structure these locales adopt - corridor blasting until large room, only exit closes on your heels - does the job well enough. Later on you'll start to wonder whether the door thing was really necessary, but Painkiller doesn't give you much time to consider these details. Red checkpoints mark partitions through each area that make it unlikely you'll see the same part twice on the game's standard difficulty, so it's rarely frustrating.

Secret areas litter the landscape, and pick-ups promote re-playability. Most notably is gold, that allows you to buy special abilities unlocked by completing challenges on each stage. Finishing levels with only one kind of gun, avoiding all health pick-ups or finding all secret areas reward you with abilities like half damage for 10 seconds or slow motion for use in your next missions. The power ups aren't quite worth the effort though, so luckily this whole aspect can be left ignored.

After the first couple of stages you won't raise an eyebrow at seeing a new staple enemy. The non-existent AI limits diversity only to new skins. Some of them demonstrate some very twisted artistic talent though. The single player demo featured peg-legged zombies that between shufflings, reached into their rotting digestive system to find bits of themselves to throw at you. It gets nastier. Crab-like humanoids with metal theatrical masks? Seven foot tall, electric-helmet-wearing asylum inmates with tentacles for arms? Loping cloaked hags with long grey hair that upon jiblification disapperate into flights of crows that flap away into the night? Check.

Level sets of six are broken up with boss battles mostly of incredible spectacle. Towering necro-giants and beast ogres stomp across large open maps while you drain your ammo into working out their weak points and fending off their underlings in the typical boss fashion. In no other game though, could bosses brake up monumental church ruins into hundreds of the bricks its made up of with his huge strides. Massive squares of stone smash across the arena floor and the lightning bursts through the nicely textured sky box, eclipsing his outline as he stomps nearer - it's quite a sight.

Surprisingly, there are only five weapons. For 24 levels of blasting this is a bit limited, but the inventiveness and functionality of each goes a long way towards making up for this. The Stake gun mechanically plunges giant rounded planks through the hearts (or any other body part you care to mention) of your foes, pinning them limply to their surroundings. The secondary function of the shotgun freezes enemies for deeply therapeutic shattering and even the default melee weapon - named after the game itself - on top of slicing with its spinning blades launches a returnable ball that can be used to damage whole streams of enemies with a yellow beam that emanates back to you from the wall you shoot it at. Shurikens and projectile lightning are the ammunition for the penultimate armament and a chain gun/rocket launcher you obtain later allows for hours of physics orientated fun. In fact...

Yes, physics. People Can Fly commented in an interview on how the middleware of the moment, Havok 2, was introduced at quite a late stage in development. It couldn't show less. The game is the best example of its implementation there is to date. Apart from enemies dying in amusing ways almost every single time due to the detailed rag dolls, the environments are stuffed with interactive objects. Explosive barrels are well, everywhere. Often cleverly stacked two or three high, they promote chain reactions that perforate hordes of minions with a single well timed stake. Fragments of metal and wooden splinters fly everywhere as do the blood particles, limbs and weapons of your hapless foes. Huge ornamental marble pillars in one section, from the persuasion of your rockets, can come loose and smash to the floor around them, blocking some baddies and killing others. In another, sacks of fireworks can be knocked over as you scramble past. Shooting the bag as enemies chase you sends the high velocity projectiles whining into their ranks, spinning unpredictably across the floor or detonating in the atmosphere.

Adding to the experience are the breathtaking visuals. Texture sets are almost completely individual to the maps, so each has a very different feel. They're also incredibly high res, really emphasising the grime of the warehouse and the missing tiles of the train station floor. The monsters you face have had similar attention; looking sharp, rounded, and enormously varied through out. Lighting is good too, with ambient sources affecting your weapons beautifully, and explosions eluminating your adversaries as they're catapulted through the air.

What's great is that all this can happen on a pretty epic scale due to the fantastic in-house built Pain engine. On VGL's 3ghz processor, 1.5 GB of DDR Ram and 9800 Pro video card system the game ran at max detail with 4x AA and 2x AF with consistent buttery frame rates of above 60, even with more than 30 high polygon enemies on screen. Amazingly, it also ran with high detail with our medium system; 1.4 ghz, 512 SD Ram and 9600 Pro rig at 30 without AA or AF, only briefly challenged in the face of volumetric fogging at close range.

Multiplayer is limited to merely seven maps. But they're solid, and provide a good addition to the SP, especially for LAN or smaller online sessions because the arenas feel a bit cramped with more than eight people. Another title that ships without cooperative play, another pixie dies. Painkiller's only contemporary rival, Serious Sam, featured the elusive MP game type and it went down a treat with it's players. It's a shame, because going by the quality of the rest of the production, co op would be right there beneath death match in the Painkiller menu. Other modes go some way in compensation; tight rocket launcher matches in which you can only damage the other player once you've blasted them into the air, or a mode in which everyone has the same weapon that changes periodically, forcing everyone to change playing style provide some amusing matches.

It was around half way through that we noticed something as we played Painkiller. It wasn't hunger, the pizza was good thanks. A niggling emptiness edged in, towards the later sections. The reason, we diagnosed later, was that Painkiller is empty. As the structure becomes familiar, (which it soon does) and the lack of AI starts to drag, you start to realise why games have moved on since Quake. Story-feeding cut scenes are literally minutes of dry, tedious screenplay between the dead, frown wearing protagonist and an Archangel wearing too much foundation. They become boring, in fact, to the point that we found ourselves actually skipping the FMV sequences for the first time in game history.

So. Painkiller, despite that negative note, features as exemplary level of polish. Breathtaking attention to detail served with great graphics that'll run on anyone's system. The game provides a lot of intensely focused carnage for as long as you only want that. For us though, that wasn't enough to keep it entertaining to the end.

Sam Goldwater