Painkiller Black Edition

This game runs great on older hardware. If you like fast paced first person shooter, this game is a must have. It's as much fun today as when it first released. I'm really enjoying this game.

Dead guy needs to kill demons to reunite with his love in heaven. The story is just an excuse to kill hordes of enemies, and shooting and killing are the 2 things the game does really well. Graphics still looks fine today and Havok physics engine used in the game was realy impressive at the time (I think it was one of the first games showcasing good physics). Your opponents - various demons or souls of the damned and locations have an interesting design and weapons are really original (like stake gun, shotgun with additional freezing ammo or shuriken launcher). Throw in tarot cards system and it gets really interesting. The Black edition includes also add-on with additional levels, weapons and enemies, continuing story from the base game. Now some flaws: some levels are available only on particular difficulty, so you won't see some of them playing on anything easier than nightmare or trauma difficulty. The second thing is that the game likes to crash during swamp boss fights and I experienced some save corrupting bug on train station level. But this could be potentially fixed with Unofficial Patch v1.66 or Randomguy7's Fix Compilation patch.

This is not a complex game by any means. The story is boring and stupid, and it never really moves past shoot badguys in the face. If that sounds bad, it isn't. This game is the absolute best in shooting badguys in the face simulation. Everything about the action is perfect. It rarely slows down (Except for that dang snowlevel, see the screenshots) everything is satisfyingly visceral, and you get a portable lawnmower on a stick. What more could you want from a shooter?

I started playing this game quite a while ago, moved it to Linux later and after not wanting to play it for a long time and then having some savestates corrupted making me to play the ugly "asylum" level again, I finally quit. It's a game in the tradition of Quake and probably exactly what many people are looking for that love old school fps, but it somehow didn't really impress me. The soundtrack is nice, the graphics ok, level design is good although the hidden stuff is way too well hidden for me to find anything, the weapons are crude which was cool in Quake 3 but I'm missing something here to be honest. It just looks dead in an uncool way. It isn't a bad game and it's even running perfectly via PlayOnLinux, but it's extremely unsatisfying, boring and doesn't give me any joy. It's really just running around and shooting hordes of boring enemies without the humour or colourful design of Serious Sam.

You've already heard about the original Painkiller's atmospheric maps, music, and fast-placed singleplayer. But I don't seem to find any multiplayer review of this game on GOG. So here it is: it may be dead for now but at the time it was gold. This game was even played at Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) championships. Its movement and gameplay was somewhat close to Quake World (Quake 1 official multiplayer) but was even faster. You could bunnyhop everywhere like crazy without stopping (there were some techniques), climb some walls by multijumps, rocketjump, grenadejump - these features were absent or highly reduced in Singlepalyer and that's unfortunate. It had People Can Fly mod that is somewhat close to Quake Rocker Arena mod. Almost all weapons have combos, when you combine left and right mouse click. The most important in the multiplayer was a grenade stake when you shoot a grenade upwards and try to hit it with the stake. You can even do this trick with the enemy's grenade and turn it back right into his face with the stake. Also, when at large distance, stake can shoot fire stakes that deal increased damage and can tear apart an enemy with a single shoot. There was a must have muliplayer mod PK++ with additional multiplayer maps like famous DM_1v1_meatless and some CPL maps. I've spent hours playing its multiplayer trying to control maps' items. I remember game legend players like sk1p, Zwiastun, AndySYS. Guys even organized events like Painkiller Black Night Marathons when you should play several hours straight. It was a really fun time. And also I remember when the game started to loose its playerbase and the last nail to its coffin was turning off Gamespy servers. However, you could still play on some dedicated servers if you knew their direct IPs. I'm not sure if there are any nowadays but I guess you can start a server and play it with friends. Search for Painkiller Black edition multiplayer footage on Youtube and you won't regret it.