All pain, plenty of gain...

By Martin Kingsley

"Excuse me my be-hooded religious friends, but I'm looking for a chap named Lucifer..."

As the years go by and games get increasingly complicated and complex, I find myself yearning for the days when men were men and graphics were CGA.

The days of Commander Keen, Doom and that rock-solid dependable known only as Guybrush Threepwood (he only wanted to be a pirate, honest).

The debut effort of Polish studio People Can Fly, Painkiller is as retro as you can get when bringing all-new bells and whistles to the table without resorting to a pair of white bell bottoms and some seriously big hair.

In the role of Daniel Garner (no relation to Jennifer), a recently killed-off soul trapped in Purgatory, you've just been offered a deal: Stop a holy war by descending through the various levels of Hell and killing everything and anything that so much as twitches including, hopefully, Lucifer himself, and you get a free pass through the pearly gates; refuse, and you'll stay in Purgatory forever and a day. Not much of a choice, really, when you get right down to it.

Anyway, end of storyline, the buck stops here. It's just you, your guns, and thousands of hellspawn from here on in. An interesting cross between Serious Sam's 'blast the crap out of fifty different enemies at once' gameplay and the more psychedelic elements of fifty years of bad horror movies, Painkiller emphasises insane amounts of gory battle and nice graphics over plot/character development, decent voice acting or even a pretty manual. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Indeed, it may even be seen as a good thing, for it allows you to get past all the extraneous dreck and on with the business of blowing the claret out of the assorted masses, which is where Painkiller really shines, in providing a simple yet fun romp across more dimensions than you can shake a pointy fractal stick at.

Trigger-happy gamers will lap this up

Split into five chapters, which are in turn split into sets of five or six levels, Painkiller (PK) takes you from dark mental asylums crawling with straitjacketed psychos and zombies with a penchant for disobeying the laws of gravity to an abandoned military base, home for a legion of skeletal riflemen; if it's strange or out-of-whack in some way, you can be assured People Can Fly have thrown it in.

There's even an opera house full of ninjas. That's got to count for something.

It's interesting to note that the first few levels of PK are comparatively drab when put side-by-side with the rest of the game, as if the level designers took a little while to find their feet.

Nowhere can this be seen better than the final Plane of Hell, a war torn battlefield frozen in time with shrapnel, bullets, exploding buildings, mushroom clouds, explosions and missiles hanging suspended in mid-air whilst the sounds of the battle that should be taking place rage around you.

It's really quite something to behold.

The world-building skills of those strange and wonderful Poles at PCF are complemented by the fantastic 3D art on show, with carefully crafted character models, dynamic lighting, specular maps and all the various forms of pixel-shader trickery available to modern man thrown in for good measure.

The best part is that, provided your computer conforms to the recommended system specifications, you can get between fifty and a hundred demon spawn of all shapes and sizes on the screen at any one time with a minimal amount of slowdown.

The best part of all of this, though, is the particular incarnation of the Havok physics engine utilised by Painkiller; I'll get into the specifics behind it in a few paragraphs, but for now:

One of the gigantic boss monsters looming large

Said demon spawn do indeed come in all shapes and sizes, with zombies, skeletons, ogres, general-issue abominations, witches, Tommygun-wielding bikers, rocket-jumping psychopaths, monks and various devils all coming into play depending on the circumstances.

Also, several of these interact with each other; for instance, the largest of the skeleton-warriors tend to grab up smaller freaks and use them as shields against the bullets, rockets, staves, grenades and shurikens you find yourself hurling at them.

Also, each chapter is ended with your standard-issue boss fight.

That's five chapters, five bosses, with a vampire immune to your weaponry, a swamp-dwelling water elemental, and two different but equally massive giants rounding out your final-chapter one-on-one match with the Big Red Guy.

Each boss fight requires that you exploit certain weaknesses and only keen observation and patience will get you through to the other side with a grip on the handle of victory. Okay, okay, crummy metaphor, but you get the idea.

To aid you in your quest, the Powers That Be have bestowed upon you five different yet vastly powerful weapons with which to kick arse. Five might not sound like a lot, but trust me when I say that the many alternate firing modes and sheer fun contained within all five makes up for the less-than-comprehensive arsenal.

In no particular order we have:

As I said, it's not much, but those five more than get the job done, particularly considering the kind of enemy numbers you face in each and every level (well over three hundred per stage in some cases).

Now, about that Havok engine. In the first few years following the introduction of ragdolling as a feasible technical concept into gaming, it was either under-utilised or badly-implemented, leading to the crazy corpse antics of Hitman: Codename 47 and, most recently, the body-bending experience that is Minority Report.

Combine the Havok 2.0 physics system and the proprietary 'PAIN' engine and you get the above

Recently, however, and particularly with the introduction of Havok and its descendants, things have been looking up.

I would not hesitate to say that Painkiller's implementation of ragdolling is the year's best, even beating Max Payne 2 hands-down, with its carefully weighted yet over-the-top behaviour.

If you take the Painkiller and grapnel a monk in the head, he goes flying over the top and connects solidly with the wall behind you, crumpling to a heap on the floor; but if you get up close and personal with the shotgun, then corpses go flying like something out of a Lord of the Rings battle sequence.

It gives you a real sense of power and of having the weight of God backing you up, and is something that significantly adds to your enjoyment of the overall experience.

Admittedly, Painkiller isn't for everyone. Those who take their gaming seriously or want an in-depth experience are advised to keep clear, and any with a weak stomach would do well to heed the same advice, due to the sometimes explicitly gory nature of Painkiller's gameplay.

Still, if Serious Sam had appeal but seemed a tad light-hearted, then Painkiller is definitely a game worth considering.

Game: Painkiller
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: People Can Fly

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Painkiller is on the shelves now.