Painkiller Review

Who wants all those messy complications anyway?

Painkiller and Operation Flashpoint represent completely different ends of the action gaming spectrum. The key issue of separation here is that there are some people who don't like to think while they're being entertained. These are the people who watch daytime TV and buy Kenny G records. And there's a special class of people, and I'm talking about first-person shooter fans here, who gravitate towards games that offer a wealth of physical challenges and no mental ones. These are the so-called "twitch" gamers, gamers whose only concern is moving through a target-rich environment without the messy complexity of crouching, reloading, or exploring. That's Painkiller.

It's not that crouching or reloading or exploring have any value by themselves. Still, when combined with a particular context, those extra moves can do a lot to increase the player's options and limitations. There's more choice involved, I suppose. While games don't necessarily have to go as far as the unwieldy and overly cerebral Operation Flashpoint, I tend to like my action games to have a little more depth and complexity than I found in Painkiller.

There is a story here but you probably won't care. Heck, you might not even notice it expect for the lengthy and tiring cutscenes between the game's chapters. As near as I can tell, after your character dies, he's kept from going right to Heaven and instead recruited to take on the forces of Hell, combating all manner of seemingly random demons and four gigantic bosses. There's also a topless girl whose hair falls chastely over her nipples. She's your wife here and serves as, well, not much -- she's just topless.

The actual enemy and location types are almost as incidental as the story. Fighting undead versions of friars, asylum inmates, ninjas and doughboys just seems too intentionally random. I get that we're fighting the inhabitants of hell here but jumping from blasting ninjas in an opera house to gunning down World War I era zombies at an airfield seems to indicate that the developers had no clearer plan in mind that simply throwing a bunch of random things together. The enemies themselves are dangerous in exact proportion to their numbers. Unless they've been told by the designers to stay in one, pre-scripted sniping location, they generally just run straight for you.

In most cases, they don't have too terribly far to go. The areas you fight in are relatively small, ranging from a single room to the area outside of a city block. After a few hours the spaces open up just a bit, allowing you to fight enemies in a large theater or a sprawling airfield. Still, each location is isolated from the others while you're fighting and the game quickly develops a rhythm of walking into a room, killing everyone there, and then repeating the process until you reach the end of the level. A handy system of regular checkpoints keeps you from having to backtrack much (or thinking about saving the game yourself -- more brain power saved!).

In those rare moments where the next waypoint isn't immediately visible, you'll have a handy compass to point you in the right direction. It even tells you if you're above or below your waypoint, saving you lots of running around. A few times, when enemies still needed to be killed before moving on, the compass seemed to stop working altogether but it always led me to my next waypoint once I dispatched the lone, straight-jacketed, electrified, hellish lunatic lurking in some out of the way corner. In killing these enemies, you release their soul. These small green wisps can be collected to gain health (one soul equals a measly one point) but regaining health isn't the primary point here. Once you get enough souls together, your character enters a brief demon phase in which he becomes an amazing killing machine.

Beyond Hell's rank and file, you'll also have to take on each of Hell's main generals. These boss fights present a challenge initially but, once you figure out the gimmick, they're relatively straightforward. The trick here is in finding out what to do, not in actually doing it. I will say of the bosses that they're just about the biggest thing I've seen in a game. They dwarf your character and really inspire a sense of urgency and fear. Fighting an enemy who's 30 to 40 times as large as you is pretty daunting -- until you realize, of course, that you just have to shoot them in the [blank] in order to take them out.