Painkiller Black Edition

Nothing short of the pinnacle of fast paced, pure fps. Set in purgatory. Spectacular.

Painkiller delivers exactly what you'd expect from a game like quake or doom but puts its own humor and twists into it that make it truly its own game. -BLOOD and lots of it. -Screw story, the story is superficial. You died, you kill monsters for God in inhumane ways. Welcome to Hell. -Weapons that make your inner teenage boy squeal such as a stake gun that pins enemies to the wall, a shotgun that can freeze enemies and blast them into frozen chunks, or the painkiller staff which essentially is a blender. -Big bad guys -LOTS of bad guys -Ragdoll physics (this is very fun when you are using the painkiller staff which makes them flop around before their bodies explode) -Collectible cards that you get from completing different challenges in each level that when activated you get special powers or bonuses at the cost of some coins. If you want story, intelligent AI, pacifism, or educational software then go elsewhere. Otherwise enjoy you brainrotting mindless bloody murder game. :D

If Serious Sam is your piece of cake - be sure to buy this classic. This is by far the best Painkiller compilation ever - boasting awesome visuals and gameplay even today. Its worth every cent! Be sure to install Ordeal 2 mod for full experience! By the way - plays EXCELLENTLY in Linux with opensource AMD drivers! Just make sure to lowercase everything you might merge in files when installing mods.

Painkiller is the rightful successor to both Doom and Quake. It features the former's high body count and frenetic pace, and it delivers on the latter's emphasis on quick gunplay and even quicker movement control. What you end up with is a truly potent concoction of guts and blood, heavy metal musak, spacebar mashing ("hua-hua-hua!" grunts the FPS Guy) and generally dying quite a bit - even on the normal difficulty of Insomnia. Fans of tactical shooters or even the recent spat of cover-based, pot-shot taking titles need not apply. This is a game from another era, from a more "hardcore" heritage of FPS, and for that I salute it. None of this would be worth a dime if it weren't executed with such pomp and precision. It's a bloody rave, to be sure, but its all done very well. From the gorgeous, expansive environments where you'll seamlessly frag one corridor to the another, the game never lets up on the visual front. There are Gothic cathedrals aplenty; there are abandoned train stations; there are dark and stormy asylums; and even opera houses to name a few of the eclectic level design examples. And with controls as tight as these, how you maneuver through these murderous corridors can be as artful or as haphazard as your skill with the keyboard and mouse will allow; either way, you'll have a blast. The guns are a decidedly original bunch, even in a genre as rooted in tradition as the 'oldschool FPS'. You have your ranged railgun-like stakegun, you have your bread and butter shotgun, you have your rocket launcher, your lightning gun, your grenades and your melee weapon. Painkiller's somewhat original contribution to these archetypes lie in the secondary fire mode. You can seamlessly chain attacks for fanciful execution and/or whenever the situation calls for the appropriate tool. Hairy areas (and especially harder difficulties) will require you to become a master of all the weapons; there is no extraneous addition to the arsenal, as everything has its use and all are extremely satisfying to employ. This is, after all, the game with the "gun that shoots shurikens and lightning." What more could you want? There's also the addition of one-shot abilities you can bring in each level, the Black Tarot cards, but these rarely see use in the earlier stages of the game and collecting them are rather difficult (beat x level with y and/or z conditions). You also occasionally turn into At the end of the day, this is a game for every action fan, so long as your tolerance for motion sickness will allow you to play it. It almost feels as if the developers borrowed from another great actioner: Diablo 2. This game does indeed feel like the love child of Quake, Doom and D2. This is a good thing. For what it's worth, there are some faults with the game, keeping it from the impossible 5 star review: - There were some frequent crashes in some levels of the game. Not sure if this has to do with Win 7 64-bit, but it seems frequent quick-saves will screw you over with scripting errors. That's okay, though, as the save checkpoints (blech! I know?) are frequent. The worst you'll have to do is reload from a slightly earlier save. Just don't mash F5 too often, and have multiple saves ready. - Enemies do take forever to give up the ghost, so to speak. So if you're relying on those souls for health and to fuel your demon form, this will break gameplay somewhat. - While the physics engine is neat, it does present some problems. You'll be circle strafing and otherwise maintaining a decent speed until a piece of doorframe or a downed enemy body stifles your movement. - Hit detection is either extremely accurate or spotty: as enemies zigzag along or fiddle about in their attack animations, many of your more precise weapons (ie. stake gun) will miss by a hair. This could be entirely my (lack of) aim, but you'll often find projectiles going through their legs or over their shoulders or under their armpits. Again, this is either some amazingly accurate hit detection or the game simply refuses to let me snipe baddies from afar with my stake gun, forcing me to mid-range it. - You can't rocket jump in single-player; at least, not that I've successfully done. Blasphemy!

This game appears to be an enjoyable, classic first-person shooter. The main features of the gameplay are the massive amounts of enemies to tear through, large open levels to circle-strafe about, and the tarot card collectibles to add a sense of progression and some incentive to explore. However, it became apparent in a few hours of play that the game seems susceptible to not only crashing, but also the corruption of save files. Overall, this game does not seem to be worth the fuss of dealing with lost progress or using fan-made fixes to complete it. The current state of this release is simply not acceptable.