A bloody mess held together quite well
In Painkiller: Hell Wars you take the role of Daniel Garner, a young man who takes his wife out for some dinner. As they are driving along a dark, rainy night, a car comes head on with the couple, killing them instantly. Cathrine, your wife, is sent to heaven. Sadly you are not. An arch angel appears and tells you that Lucifer's army is on the run and its your job to kill all 4 of his generals. You must fight your way through purgatory, set in between heaven and hell, in order to be reunited with your love.
Painkiller: Hell Wars is levels taken from Painkiller for the PC in 2004 and its expansion pack Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell. The gameplay is fast, simple, but fun as hell. The FPS elements are done well, with very destructive weapons at your disposal. Basically you run through a level, kill lots of enemies with a heavy metal soundtrack blazing through your speakers, and than go to the next section of the level. Sounds repetitive, and it is, but the variety of the level designs and creatures you face at to a great overall experience.
The game only has 6 weapons, but each weapon has 2 different firing modes. The painkiller has a circulating blade that shreads through its enemies with ease. It can even fire its blade across long distances and when enemies cross the beam that connects the gun to the blade, the enemies fall dead on the ground. The shotgun is very powerful, with one of the best sounds of any shotgun heard in a game, and its alternate firing mode shoots a freeze shot that temporally freezes an enemy to be later shot into icy body parts. The stake gun shoots giant 3 feet long stakes into enemies and can even pin them to walls! The alternate firing mode is a standard grenade launcher. The rocket launcher/ chaingun is another weapon as well as the electrodriver. The electrodriver shoots out ninja stars very fast and can even fry enemies with its stream of lightning. And the SMG/ flamethrower is the last weapon introduced.
This game is bloody. Very bloody and gory all the way through, but done in a good way. Whenever you kill an enemy with the shotgun or some other weapon, the body parts fly and move around, blood is smeared on the ground, and the rest of the body is throw around using a realistic Havoc 2.0 physics engine. While it sounds ridiculous, seeing the amount of realism of how the physics engine works and how violent the game is really sells the image of what this game is all about.
There are 22 different levels in the game and you can beat the game in about 3 days depending on how much time you spend each day. While this sounds bad in length, there is a moderate amount of replay value. You can play the game again on a harder difficulty (Nightmare or above) to unlock more "black tarot" cards that can be used to give Daniel special abilities in each level. Also Painkiller: Hell Wars is compatible with system link and 8 player xbox live. The multiplayer on live is fun and very fast paced like the Quake series but it still leaves a feeling of disappointment. The multiplayer is good, but with no variety in maps and the small community who actually even play online, it fells half-baked.
Since the xbox is being pushed graphically from the game's physics engine and graphic engine, there is noticeable frame-rate issues in the game. There is not a lot in most of the levels of the game, but near the end of the game, some of the levels are so big and so much is interacting in the environment that the frame-rate drops. Another thing that will disappoint players is the weapon selection. Only 2 weapons can be manually selected using the black button and using the d-pad to correspond with which direction on the d-pad. The painkiller weapon is always in your current weapon selection, and most likely the reason for this is that the weapon uses no ammo at all. This still does not justify why the weapon selection is this way, since there is a total of 6 different weapons and only 3 can be used at a time.
Overall, Painkiller: Hell Wars is a fun, satisfying experience that any FPS or action fan will enjoy. And at its current $30 price tag, it definitely is worth the purchase, or at the very least, a rental.