Painkiller is a FPS old-school game with great graphics and amazing arcade gameplay.
Just a few years back, we had some great games offering this level of gameplay. The most known is Serious Sam 1st / 2nd Encounter, from Croteam. From the same developers, Serious Sam II is out and wasn't superb like its predecessors. Then came Saber Interactive's game called Will Rock, weak and disappointing. So, for an old-school gamer like me, I'll have to wait for Serious Sam III? No, thanks to People Can Fly and DreamCatcher, the Painkiller developers.
Painkiller is similar to Serious Sam is some ways, but it has some unique features that shines over the simplicist gameplay that it offers. First of all, the graphics are great, not amazing like Doom 3, but well worked. It runs in really low-end machines: I installed this game on a PC with the following hardware: Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM and an old GeForce 2 MX 400. The game ran OK is most situations. Also, the physics engine (Havok 2.0) works almost perfectly, even better than Doom 3. When you shoot a skeleton in close-range with a shotgun, the bones will fly and hit with precision every object in the world.
I found the story well written, just because it's simple and works to put the player into the context: Daniel Garner, the character controlled by the player, suffers an accident when driving his car with his wife, Catherine. Well, it seems that Daniel died, but it wakes up with a spirit telling what he needs to do. The character will have to kill Lucifer's minions and also tries to save his beloved. OK, enough of this. You'll find more about the storyline while watching the high-quality and lengthy cinematics between the levels.
You'll fight against large armies of undead, demons, ninjas, soldiers and so. But, in general, the enemies aren't very smart and all you have to do is to shoot and dodge. Is this a problem? It's intentional. Just like in Serious Sam, enemies will engage mindless against the hero. The exceptions are mostly with bosses. They're also mindless, but you'll have to thing a little bit to beat the giant-like bosses. It's not really that hard to figure out how to kill them, as I noticed in some reviews talking about the enigmatic way to beat bosses.
Your weird arsenal contains a good variety of weapons. The first one is a blade that can be thrown or rip opponents. The second is a shotgun-like cannon, to fire at close-range. There're many others, like the Stake Gun, which I love to use like a sniper (!) to stick opponents in walls. You can change the current weapon to another in less than a second. This means that you'll use the weapon that you need at certain moments without any wait. In some games, you just kill a guy at long distance with a shotgun because you don't have time to change for a better long-ranged weapon. This will not happen in Painkiller.
Sound effects are OK, nothing special. But the soundtrack is amazing. Let me spoiler a little: The second level is something like a cathedral, which you'll fight against mad monks. And, meanwhile, a great heavy-metal music is playing while you finish the horde of monks armed with axes! A lot of fun!
Maps are very well-done. Some are just large battlegrounds with buildings as obstacles, while others are filled with corridors and small rooms. I'd like to spoiler a little bit more, but I'll stop here. But I'm sure that the player will find the levels very cool.
There're four difficult levels. You'll want to start at the regular difficult, 'Insomnia', to try the harder ones later. You'll probably want to replay the game, as some levels are locked at easier difficult levels. To ease your pain to beat some levels, you'll have the Black Tarot cards. These ones are powerups that you can use before entering a level, to boost something like health, speed etc. You'll unlock the cards by accomplishing the 'objectives', presents in every level. Sometimes you'll have to beat the entire level with a specific weapon to unlock a card, or to beat a boss before a certain time and so. To use cards you'll spent 'gold', small coin pieces found in chests, barrels and other objects. Additionally, every guy you kill will left a 'soul', which Daniel can pick up and restore small portions of health. If you get enough souls, you'll turn in a deadly monster for a short period of time.
Multiplayer... [sigh] no Cooperative mode in Painkiller, and now the old Serious Sam wins. But the Deathmatch and Voosh modes are alright. Voosh is a deathmatch variation where players are given random weapons with unlimited ammo for a period of time.
Painkiller does not have the humor that it's very present in Serious Sam, but it has hilarious moments every time. If you have morbid humor, you'll laugh sometimes with Painkiller (I say "look at his arm flying!" or "ha! I ripped his *beep* leg!"). To finish, I'm not saying that Painkiller is better than Serious Sam, but I'm so pleased with the amount of content in this game that I can now stop playing the oldies.