Gave up after about half an hour. I think this game has aged very badly indeed. At the time of release its main draw was its graphics, which now look terrible. Panning up and down is particularly ugly. I managed to progress to the second island without finding anything that really interested me.
Painkiller does most big things right, but is marred by some odd and avoidable design problems. The graphics are lovely and the game runs very smoothly. The weapons are interesting and balanced. There don't seem to be any major or fatal bugs. The boss fights are excellent. Two problems with the game concern the sub-systems: soul-collection and tarot-cards, neither of which are well thought out and if anything detract from the game. The plot is execrably awful, to the point where I hit escape whenever a cutscene began. It is of course, eminently skippable, but one wonders why they bothered with it all given how bad and unnecessary it is. The biggest problem, though, is the checkpoint system, which I have to call "bugged", since you can break levels completely by activating checkpoints in the wrong order, something which is very easy to do in some levels. Made worse by the fact that *not* looking for obscure routes will cause you to miss secrets, and exploring thoroughly and carefully may cause you to break checkpoints. Other more minor complaints include the fact that the difficulty levels aren't allowed to *be* difficulty levels (i.e. ways people of different skill can enjoy the game), but have subsystems and levels swapped in and out, and that in many levels the enemy distribution is very repetitive. At least in this version all difficulty levels are unlocked from the beginning.
Close to flawless as a pure fighting game, just so long as you don't expect it to do anything particularly unusual. Rather whimsical, anime, slightly-silly-at-times style, which might put some people off. Gorgeous graphics and animation (except that the intro and victory animations are a little stilted- the in-game animation is very fluid). Unfortunately, the PC port doesn't allow you to map most buttons on the keyboard, which is a little annoying. If you want to play 2-player, I'd definitely suggest owning at least one joypad/stick, though it isn't absolutely essential. There's no English dub, by the way- all of the dialogue (announcer excepted) is in Japanese, and you get subtitles only in the story-mode clips- the in-game and pre-battle banter are entirely untranslated. The subtitles are competently done, though. Can't really comment on how well balanced it is, since I'm a very casual player at best, but it seems OK to me.
