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.
