Painkiller Battle out of Hell Review

Battle out of Hell (BooH) is the first Painkiller expansion pack out from Polish developer People Can Fly and distributor DreamCatcher. Painkiller was released earlier this year with great expectations from the gaming community, both for the single player game and also for the multiplayer game which promised to be Quake-like. The singleplayer game was a tremendous success. The multiplayer game was a bitter disappointment. Since then there have been features added with patches and a new hope that comes in the form of the expansion pack. There are going to be growing pains as a company puts out a product and a struggle in supporting the product while continuing with new development. So what can be expected?

The Game
Painkiller is based in purgatory. The player gets the job of fighting off demons that have been invading and corrupting other souls. The levels are very dirty, and bland colors all combine to set the mood and atmosphere. That is great material for future expansions, just take a theme, make it old and abandoned and evil, and populate it with demonic souls. It makes for some fun game play.

Like the original game, this one can be played in three different manners. The first goal is to complete the game, the second goal is to meet the different challenges of each level (i.e.[/b] take no damage, kill less than 88 enemies, etc) and the third goal is to get 5 stars in each level (pick up all ammo, break all things, pick up all armor, get all holy items, find all secrets. That gives it a lot of replay value. Meeting the challenge of each level will get a Black Tarot card. With the right combinations of some of the Tarot cards you become virtually unstoppable, even through the Trauma level. It is a lot of fun to go back and replay a level at a harder difficulty while putting a serious hurting on the enemies.

The enemies have been made stronger for this game, but they have to be in order to present a challenge. In the prior game the stake gun was as a one shot kill for many enemies. Many of the new enemies will take at least two. All of the original Black Tarot cards are available and can be placed after the character finds enough gold, so it is easy to compensate. The enemies and the levels are all original, with very different enemies throughout the game. Some of the levels are great, others are less so. There are eight regular levels and a two boss levels. The carnival level looks good, although the really interesting parts cannot be accessed. The Stone Pit level also looks interesting, with lots of criscrossing layered bridges. The Shadowland level has the best rendered sky I have ever seen. Standing at an edge it looks like the level is falling into an eternal hole.

The Havok physics remain. The game doesn't do too much with the physics, but it is nice to see flying and exploding enemies and the variety of ways they can impact. For the expansion, they have added a couple of areas that involve shooting from moving platforms. That is ok, but it is a little more limiting than what I like.


Weapons
The guns in original PK were very new and creative, dual firing modes for each and also combo modes. For the expansion we have two new guns, the SMG/Flamethrower and the Boltgun/Heater. The SMG is armor piercing machine gun that fires in bursts. It is more powerful than the one included with the rocket. The flames from the flamethrower are a little slow, you can burn yourself in them. The flame effects in the game are very realistic, about as well as has been done before. The Boltgun is one that makes you go hmmmm and then puts a big smile on your face. The original game featured a Stakegun. This one is a similar concept except that it shoots batches of 5 bolts at a time, Wow. This one is good for spraying rooms. In addition they do not arc, and it can also zoom to allow sniping of distant enemies. The alternate fire throws batches of bouncing grenades. They are a little unpredictable, but good for taking out crowds. Both modes use a lot of ammo, but then again the player can also hold a lot. Overall the game features a nice selection of weapons. There are lots of different tools to get the job done, and some work better than others. Using the different weapons is one of the fun aspects of Painkiller.


Graphics
The graphics engine has been updated. This brings both positive and negative benefits. On the positive side, it adds heat and haze distortion, specular mapping, and Shader Model 3.0 support. On the negative side, anyone without one of the latest cards will probably take a big hit in the framerates. This will requiring lowering the resolution or texture details or turning off graphic features in order to maintain the same level of play as before. The original game too can be replayed with the new graphics effects, yet another incentive to revisit the prior game. Added to the game are improved environmental effects. The water effects look much better as does the moving sky. The fog effect looks good, but in moving around it became apparent that it was implemented as an irregular type of haze that surrounds the player and has no real depth. On the Orphanage level the light is provided by a strange flickering that can almost be seen at the bottom left of the screen. Amost like the player has a torch, but with no torch or explanation.


Problems
I have found bugs with the patch. I was not able to load and play any old saved games. That is annoying because all of the original statistics are gone. That is not to be unexpected. Many other game patches will not support prior saved games. It would have been better to know in advance rather than the scripting errors and crashes to the desktop that resulted. So BooH has to be started with a clean slate. In addition some of the levels will crash. This can be very annoying. The load times have taken a turn for the worse. The initial level load and 'quick' load both load all resources and take the same amount of time. In the first game, they were somewhat long. Annoying, but bearable. For the new game the loads take some 40 to 50 seconds each on a 2400 MHz machine. That is way too long and is disrupting to the flow of the game. In Doom III and Half-Life the initial game loads can be long, but once all of the resources are in memory it takes seconds to reload. Some of the BooH points and puzzles involve jumps. That is fine, but when combined with the painful load times - it really disrups the flow of the game. It is common to spend 3 seconds trying to make a jump and then 50 seconds of either waiting for the game to reload or setting up the jump again. Hopefully this will be addressed in a patch.


Sound
The original game used a lot of tracks from the Polish heavy metal group, Meth. That gave a lot of atmosphere and character to the game. Some liked it, some hated it, For the expansion pack the music is more in line with your typical game music. There is regular music to set the overall mood and battle music for all the fights. Nice, but not the impact of the original.


Multiplayer
The original distribution suffered from lots of lag complaints. Several patches went out, but they did not really help. During all of this an X-BOX version of the game was created. That version has not come out yet, but PCF was able to leverage the netcode experience of the X-Box to develop all new netcode for BooH. The expansion will update Painkiller to 1.5 and includes two new game modes, Capture the Flag and Last Man Standing. A future patch will update existing installs to 1.5. That will allow everyone to play with the new netcode, but currently the only way to get it is to buy the expansion pack. Hopefully at that time, people will revisit Painkiller. The Painkiller Series may have an interesting future. The CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) has chosen Painkiller to be the official games of their $1,000,000 world tournament. As a part of that agreement they have a laundry list of things that will have to be added to Painkiller. So far it has not brought more players to Painkiller, but that may change with the expansion and the patch. The CPL games will be based on the original Painkiller, however the world tour will be based on the Black Edition.

Has the netcode improved? Yes, it has. However it is hard to tell to what degree. True testing will have to be done on high ping servers with lots of players. There are not enough people playing in order to do that today.


Conclusion
Painkiller overall is a work in progress. It is a little unfair to compare it to other established games that have years of development and refinement under their belt. PCF has done a lot to address major issues and complaints. The contract with the CPL is likely to guarantee more development and refinement on the multiplayer aspects of the game. For those that enjoyed the original game, this is a must have. For those that like straight shooter games like Serious Sam, picking up both versions of the game is suggested, or pick up the Black Edition (which will have both) when it comes out early next year. For those that were disappointed with the multiplayer aspects of the game, it might be time to give it another try. Is the expansion worth it? At $19.95 it is an easy desicison.

Rating: 85%