Painkiller Black Edition

The main gameplay involves killing enemies, then advancing to the next area. All well and good. But when it comes to the boss fights... They are not well designed. Little room for error. Having to look up walkthroughs. Ruins the enjoyment.

This is not a gem - it's a generic, half-assed FPS. I am not a big fan of the genre, and a bit reason for that is because I suck at FPS games. There have been very few FPS games I have actually enjoyed, because most take themselves far too seriously. I like to shoot things to reduce my frustration, but I am just not that good at not getting my arse handed back to me thanks to the constant hankering to the "hardcore" crowd. So, I tend to play play these on easy - I don't even bother trying the harder difficulty levels - I know that chances are I'm going to find the easiest levels pretty challenging anyway, and on the higher difficulty settings, I'm pretty much going to be wanting to throw my PC out the window by level four. I play these games to vent, yet more often than not, I find they are more a source of frustration than a means to release it. One source of this is when the designers, in their "infinite" wisdom decide that they want to reserve their unique schitch for higher difficulty levels. That's not going to make me want to practice to get better at the game - that's going to make me want to uninstall and never play the game again, because without your unique schtick, you are just a bland, generic FPS. The controls are clumbsy and awkward, and I have enough trouble as it is. The fact that the first level is filled with enough interface screws to drive a person complete mad is just sloppy design. All fun has gone out of the window, at least for me, in favour of the hardcore gamer. So, bodies drop souls for you to collect for health and become a killer demon - great! Except that you have to wait a few moments for them to appear, and are normally too busy fighting other creatures to collect them, and by the time you get them, they are gone. That makes sense. Between running around gathering souls, having my aim knocked off because I get hit - something which ALL enemies do, not just the big ones - and being blinded by the forementioned interface screws, I'm pretty sure I've spent more time in this game pumping ammo into the floor than into anything that can actually be killed. Add to the confusion the fact that somehow I managed to bring up the console, but I couldn't rid of it, while it blocked my game as the game was still playing in the middle of the fierce firefight with the floor. Yeah, I know I suck, but I think it might make a nice change if designers made a FPS that actually catered for people who aren't "hardcore" and helped them out a bit - not locked them out of the very features they could use to help them through the game because I suck at it. All that's going to do is alienate me further from the genre, and from the development studio... I'm so glad I didn't buy this when it first came out, and I really regret buying it now. At least it was cheap, right?

If you never played Serious Sam before, you might enjoy this game. At least I did when I first tried it. Painkiller being my introduction to this type of game, and it having a horror theme and a half-decent soundtrack, I was into it. I found it difficult, so it was fun. But one corrupted save & 2 Serious Sam games later, and this feels like Serious Sam for kids. Every enemy behaves the same, mindlessly running towards you, and are easy to avoid and gun down from a distance. And because all enemies simply run at you they crowd together, and are easy to kill with a grenade. Also, having played Serious Sam it's incredibly easy to guess where enemy spawning points are located, and where cheap deaths are located - those places that if you reach them, you'll cause 10 enemies to spawn around you. All I really had to do was stand next to a spawning point & wait, to kill every enemy in the level. You see, you need to kill all the enemies to advance, which turns this game into a chore. Enemy AI is fairly stupid, so more often than not they get stuck behind some item & you have to go search for them. Think of searching for a camper in Count Strike. Not very fun. To make that chore much easier, you're given an arrow that points at enemies, and when they're all dead, points at the exit. Which does make things more bearable, but makes the game easier - when an enemy is rushing you from behind, or spawning behind you, you'll know. I would have much preferred killing all enemies to be an achievement, not a requirement. Getting from A to B, or having to kill 80% of the enemies would have been much more fun. And frankly, that's the biggest problem with this game - it being a chore. It's like a Serious Sam game made not fun. Levels all look the same, enemies are stupid & easy to kill, and they all behave the same. You have collectibles to go after, like gold, but there's no point to it. And when the game does become hard, like when fighting a boss, it only becomes more of a chore.

Hey im from Poland . This game is first polish game that succeed. Horror climat ist hot ! Now this game is very cheap. Enjoy !!

Fun shooter, not the best, crashes on loading in the Catacombs level, can't continue... :(