Painkiller Review

[SALvation]

Painkiller is a new game developed by People can Fly and published by Dreamcatcher. It is refreshing to see the creativity coming out of areas that are not America and Japan. First you have Serious Sam, produced by a Croatian group, then Will Rock, partially developed by a Russian group, Painkiller, developed in Poland, and also the upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R, which is being developed in Russian also.

Painkiller has been anxiously awaited for the past year. Was it worth the wait? Let's see...

Painkiller is a first person shooter. The game begins with your death that sends you to purgatory. Of course you don't feel that you belong there. In order to get to heaven you have been assigned the role of Heaven's hitman, to move on you must kill 4 of Lucifer's generals so as to prevent a hellish rebellion. To get to them, you have to kill hoards of minions that have invaded purgatory.

So... what do we have to look forward to?

Visuals: They really went all out for this game. The graphics are state of the art and the special effects are superb. The textures are different on every level, and the game has the widest variety of enemies I have seen in a 3D game. The palette leans heavily towards black and white tones, but this is purgatory after all. The cut scenes are videos placed after the major boss levels. That's fine, no need to push the story, as the game is not really about the story, but about action. Of all the graphics, the only thing I don't like is the way the water was done. It looks like it has the consistency of something like Jello. Everything cannot be perfect, but they have come very close in this game.

There are 24 single player levels - 19 actual levels and 5 boss levels.

The sound effects are amazing. There is lots of gothic music, chanting, and a beating heart to set the mood. The sound transitions are stunning. You will have an ambient soundtrack along with a harder rock edge during the fight scenes. A sound track of the music may be released at a later date.

As for the rest of the enemies, you have a tremendous variety of enemies (24) that use a tremendous variety of attacks. The developers claim advanced AI and team tactics. Different enemies will vary their attacks based on other monsters currently in play. In addition some are aware of their life force, and may give it to others when near death. Some enemies will use others as a shield, or decapitate lesser enemies to drive them berserk, and so on. It makes for a very interesting experience. On the other AI side, you have enemies that must move around a set of obstacles because they can't walk over a small mound.

Aside from finding the secrets, the bosses and sub-bosses are as close as you get to puzzles. Killing them is often a matter of shooting the right thing at the right time, and figuring out exactly what that is. The bosses are also insanely huge, similar to what was seen in Serious Sam. They feature multiple attacks and will also spawn minions to keep you busy.

The enemies will come at you in hoards, but not Serious Sam like hoards, where you can have dozens. These are much more limited and easier to beat. Some of the enemies do a lot of damage, but a lot of them do not. Perhaps the most disruptive aspect is that a successful attack on you can throw off your orientation, leading to more successful attacks and damage.

Running and jumping is very... interesting. Default movement is not too fast, but with timed jumping you can go into a bunny-hop mode that allows you to speed up, jump higher, and cover greater distances. You can jump up steep inclines, and when you combine that with the bunny hop... if it isn't vertical, you can probably get up there.

Of course the game features the Havok physics. I think that the next version of Tetris that comes out will also feature Havok physics. With Havok physics you can do amazing things, realistic animations of falling or flung objects, impacts, blasted body parts, etc. Unfortunately, I think it may be causing other problems with multiplayer. I go into that more later.

The weapons are a little different from your typical shooter. You have 5 weapons with primary and secondary attacks, and combo attacks when used together. You have the standard assortment of weapons. The only one really missing is a sniper rifle, and many will not miss it at all.

Your default infinite ammo weapon is the painkiller. Primary is a spinning blade, also known as pain. Secondary will launch it into a wall or enemy. This is the killer. Primary then secondary will shoot the spinning blade. Better though is just secondary. It can kill the weaker enemies, pull them towards you, and you can even juggle their bodies with repeated presses. If you embed the blade in a wall, as long as you point at it, a beam will connect to it to damage or kill enemies that encounter it. Secondary also makes it easier to recover souls, because it will pull the bodies toward you rather than throwing them to random distant locations.

For the shotgun, you have a freezer as a secondary. This will freeze a group of enemies that you can then you can easily blast to pieces. The shotgun becomes useless after a certain range and is somewhat weak overall.

The stake gun and grenade is an interesting combo. You can easily stake enemies to the wall or floor or other enemies. It is a very powerful weapon, and at a distance the stakes will ignite for more damage. The stake gun does have an arc to master and a slow reload time. The grenades are your typical bounce around a few times cans before blowing.

You also have a rocket launcher / chain gun combo. Blast a group to get them weak with splash damage - then finish them with the chain gun. The People Can Fly death match mode is based on this concept.

An interesting weapon is the driver / electro combo.
Spike an enemy to anchor the lightning beam and hit other nearby enemies. More great special effects are used here as the electricity twitches the bodies.

The weapon pickup is nice. You can program what sequence to switch weapons to. This feature is very useful in multiplayer mode and is sorely missed in other games. In addition you only really have 5 weapons, so finding a weapon is easy. And if you prefer the alt-fire weapon, you can instantly remap it to be your primary firing mode.

For replay value:

The game was designed with that in mind. Each time you play a level, it is with a specific goal in mind. If you accomplish the goal, you get a black tarot card. There are two types of cards. The silver cards last for the entire game. An example would be one that makes souls stay longer or doubles the gold on a level. You can hold two silver cards and three gold cards. The gold cards can only be used once, all at once, and they only last a limited duration. You can either find a black tarot in secret locations, or you can purchase them with the gold you find on a level – if you accomplish the task specified for that level. You collect gold by breaking things. Lots of things.

Some of the secret areas are easy to find, they involve searching everywhere, all buildings. Much harder are the ones that you have to jump to, and some are very difficult. A status screen can be pulled up with the tab key. It will show your success in accomplishing various potential goals on the level, like for instance, souls collected, secrets found, ammo found, gold picked up, objects destroyed, holy items found. You can always replay levels to accomplish goals. The game play is pretty much to where the game herds you into one area and then you have to clear the monsters to move on. At the end of the level the gates open up and you can go back to look for secrets – if you can get back.

Difficulty: Playing the game on nightmare level has not been that hard, at least for the initial levels. It ramps up after the first boss and becomes much harder. Each level should take a minimum of 15 minutes or much more, and more if you are attempting to accomplish the challenges presented. You can save anywhere, and the game will also automatically save at a series of checkpoints. If you are playing on an easier mode, then you will recover health at some checkpoints. There are very few health pickups and armor pickups. The health isn't as necessary, as there is another means of recovering health - by picking up souls - except in Trauma mode. There, you will have to work very hard not to take damage. Otherwise, each time you kill an enemy, their body will eventually disappear and their green soul will remain. Picking it up before it fades will add one to your health. The nasty enemies will leave red souls behind, and those count for more. Of course, collecting all of these damned souls will have a consequence. After every 66, you will briefly turn into a demon. Then all the textures flare to white, the enemies are red, you are fast and invulnerable, they are slow... It makes for a great killing time. You will receive a warning when this is coming up by having the last few souls quickly flash you into and out of demon mode. At that point you may want to wait until the next hoard appears before collecting more souls.

Multiplayer:
There are various complaints about multiplayer.

Some don’t like that a CD is required to run a server. Really, that makes no sense. Unreal Tournament has the right idea. Anyone can download the dedicated server directly from their website and run it for free. Of course you still need a cd-key to play. The more servers that are running, the closer one will probably be near you – and that may be important. Overall, that strengthens the community and would add to the longevity of the game. Hopefully this group will see the light.

Currently there are only 4 skins available. More skins, more colors, and some female skins would be nice. There are complaints that in TDM, teammates can not be distinguished between others... Hopefully that will be changed. The developers have tried to be responsive to the community.

As for the levels, they tend to be on the smaller side. There are 5 different game types and six different levels. Noticeably missing is capture the flag. Battles are very spammy. The default respawn weapon is the stake gun, and it often is a one hit kill even on a player with armor. Run out of stakes and you will find yourself running around looking for ammo. The weapon balance will probably be adjusted in the next patch.

Ok, now for the rants. There have been some complaints about the Havok physics. For multiplayer, the important thing is to keep all of the client computers in sync with the server as frequently as possible. That is what makes for smooth game play. The best way to do that is to report on the status of all objects in the game with every tick. If a client misses a tick, or is delayed, then that results in laggy game play.

With Havok physics each object now has multiple properties, and indeed can break into multiple other objects with their own properties. Updating the clients as to all of these other objects can use up all the upstream bandwidth of a server, and that makes for intense lag on all of the clients.

So as a result, there has to be a compromise. The server may only send updates relevant to each particular client. That means that a demo record mode, if it was available, could only record what one player was viewing. Currently there is no demo mode. In the manual, and even in the dedicated server, are settings for observer mode. That also does not currently exist. Hopefully those will be added in the future.

In addition, the game play appears to favor those with lower ping. There may not be any effective lag compensation, which means that higher ping players will most likely not bother. In addition there are also reports of pauses in the game play.

A secondary rant, and I think an important one is the missing cooperative game, where a group of people can play the entire single player game online. This is very missed. There are lots of people that enjoy coop mode games, and prefer killing monsters together as compared to the competitive nature of death match and other variants. I was very disappointed not to see it in Halo and I am very disappointed not to see it here. The last game I have seen it in was Will Rock. Although it was fun, the overall net code implementation was done poorly, and the game is not thriving. Perhaps for Painkiller the nature of Havok physics and the large amount of processing and information transfer to the clients has made that mode impractical. If so, it is a great loss for People Can Fly. Part of having a strong game with longevity is having a strong and varied gaming community to support it. By not having coop mode, they have limited the gaming community to those that will participate in the frag matches. It is very unfortunate. Hopefully that will be added at some point in the future.

For the mod and upgrade community: Well, there may not be much to be expected here. All of the levels were designed with Maya, which is a high-end 3D development tool that your typical modder may not have access to. Tools may or may not be released in the future for this purpose. It would be nice but...

Bottom line - I give the single player aspect of the game a 10/10. It is a fantastic and superb implementation. The entire mood and atmosphere are phenomenal and that makes this probably the best first person shooter ever.

Multiplayer - 3/10. There is a ton of potential. My issues are with the net code implementation, the lack of ability to make demos, the lack of observers, the lack of a coop mode and the lack of future map/mod expectations.

Should you buy the game for multiplayer? You will probably want to wait and see. I think that overall the game play is probably more similar to Quake III than any other. The current form is nothing special, and I don’t see a compelling reason to play this over my current favorites. However that may change in the future, depending on what degree the developers go out of their way to help encourage this market.

Will the game thrive? I certainly hope so. Certainly the developers have been responsive. Now that the single player mode is complete, I hope that they can spend more time fixing and enhancing the multiplayer issues. The upcoming patch is supposed to address some of the multiplayer issues. I hope that the issues I bring up are also addressed.

Note: the 1.1 patch is supposed to add observer mode, demo recording, and a call-vote system.