The game changes drastically somewhere in the middle when you get the vampire glove and vampire weapons. It has interesting combo system similar to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Wolfenstein 2009 atmosphere. If you collect all the secret artifacts during walkthrough, you'll get additional melee combo powers. At the end of the game you'll get a new glove ability - chains, like from the Hellraiser movie that can rip your enemies apart.. and you can continue the game with all the unlocked abilities in Game+. There are also challenge stages in the game that are quite fun, especially with the unlocked artifact abilities.
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.
This series is the first games of Frictional Games and they are the best. Much better then Amnesia or SOMA. Penumbra: Black Plague - this one is real treasure. It has great improvements compare to it's predecessor Penumbra: Overture. (Gameplay is similar to Amnesia). If U like horror games - This package is highly recomended.
This game has a lot of nice ideas, good atmosphere: Pro's But.. it's boring. Has confusing level design, unballanced gameplay; Con's Don't want to re-play it again, at all
Game is too old Price is too high This game is pure nostalgy, but I don't want to play it nowadays. It's ancient in all aspects. It was only cool in my childhood. Yes, it still has small community, a lot of mods, but... we have Doom 1-2 which has much bigger community, more mods, different engines, multiplayer and so on. Wolfenstein is a part of history, must be for free. And nowadays I will not play it even for free.
This is a very good competitive shooter with big community, and a lot of mods, maps. And yes its better then Quake Live. BUT WHAT THE HELL WITH PRICE??? Its expensive on steam also (but a bit cheaper). ID and Bethesda do you realise this game is very ancient? It has some minor graphic issues on very high resolutions, it has very bad server searcher, it has famous bug called Over Bounce witch was fixed only in ProMode. And for me its unplayable without OSP or CPMA (or other quality mods). I advice users better buy Unreal Tournament 99 or wait for Unreal Tournament 4 (it will be free game). ID and Bethesda do you feel differences Unreal Tournament 4 on modern engine is free and old Quake3 is 20 bucks (13 on steam)?
