Painkiller: Overdose

This game in my opinion, was terrible. I want to be the demon slayer, not the demon. I was not a fan of the gunplay, the dialogue or, the music. It all felt like a step-back. As a kid I played the crap out of the Painkiller Black demo disc I got with PC Magazine, I played it so much that when I finally re-purchased the full game as an adult it was all muscle memory. This game is a huge step backwards.

See Lord_Kane's review. No need for me to type almost the same review in different words. If you liked Painkiller, you will probably like Overdose too, but just not as much. If you haven't tried Painkiller yet, you should do that right now. But the original Painkiller, not this one.

i bought Painkiller Special Edition years ago and fell in love right away. not everyone is into mindless first person shooters but if you are then Painkiller SE delivered BIG TIME!!!! this game seems to use the same game engine as PSE but doesn't feel as enjoyable. but what ruins it for me is that for some strange reason your character has to make random 0ne-liners every 10 seconds or every time you kill an enemy, and the worst part is YOU CAN NOT EVER TURN IT OFF. yep....you heard me right, no way to disable it. i'am only 5 minutes in and am already getting annoyed. can't imagine playing this game for an hour or more. i wish game developers would take this into consideration when making games. please give us the OPTION to turn OFF things we might not like, GAWD!!!!!

Painkiller: Overdose is a spinoff to the first Painkiller game, taking place after the ending but as a different character. You play as Belial, a half-demon, half-angel imprisoned by Lucifer but now free to take revenge. Gameplay and graphics are almost the same, you use weapons with more or less similar functions and some new ones (with demonic aesthetic) to defeat the legions of Hell while optionally collecting Tarot Cards by fulfilling certain conditions. I said the levels are better, for starters there are no difficulty-locked levels! And maybe it's just me, but the levels feel more unique here, with more better-designed colorful ones and less boring contemporary ones. What stood out for me were a fantasy forest, a movie studio, and an alien base. But the story is very simple, and while Painkiller doesn't have much in the first place, here the cutscenes are just storybook images with Belial narrating. No dialogue with other characters, nothing. And it's very straightforward But for me the biggest problem with this game is the difficulty. It just feels so unbalanced. Some levels are easy, while some others are nearly unbeatable with bullet sponge enemies that deal high damage quickly. I had to turn on god mode several times. Another is slow loading times, but can easily be fixed by making an empty folder named "maps" in the "Painkiller: Overdose/Data" folder. Overall, I think Overdose is still a worthy successor of the Painkiller games, unlike the disliked following titles. If you enjoyed the first one you would surely enjoy this game as well, since it kinda has its own unique style.

Another review says this game feels like a fan-made mod and that about nails it. The fundamentals of the OG Painkiller are here, but sadly it stumbles on from there. Many of the new weapons really don't have a good place in the roster. Either their effects aren't clearly readable, like the demon head where the secondary fire is a shout-attack which is actually a slow moving, long range projectile. Or on the other hand, the crossbow which shoots grenades with large splash damage, but the projectiles don't fly far at all, making it more dangerous than useful. Some enemies suffer this issue too. There's a flame elemental enemy which actually looks just like the omnipresent environmental fire effect, which also has no clear hit/pain state animation, nor does it give feedback when killed. Just feels messy to fight. And then there are the technical issues. The game crashes pretty regularly on Win10 and run on a modern GPU. I don't think I made it for longer that 30-40 minutes without being ungraciously being sent to my desktop wallpaper. The game also drops to 2-5 fps in the menus when run in 4k, though not in all of them. I first thought this might not be a big issue, however, it also drops mouse inputs when navigating, say the options or level selection, which results in not being able to click what you want and mouse-over highlighting of items does not register, making menus a major hassle. All in all, there's really no reason to pick this up. The OG game is miles better, and just about any shooter that came out since is going to be a better time. If you need a fix in this direction, pick up any more recent boomer shooter.