Painkiller

289 words.

I also downloaded Painkiller from Steam the other day for 9.95. I hear a lot of people complaining about the Steam platform, but I have to say that the concept of impulse buying quality games without even leaving your chair is pretty cool. :) I’ve never had any problems with Steam, although admitedly I haven’t used it all that extensively.

As for Painkiller, it forkin’ rules!! Talk about an old school game — it’s almost a direct rip-off of the classic old id Software games Wolfenstein and Doom. There’s no story, plot, or thinking involved. You just run around repetitively shooting anything that moves. (And you don’t even have to reload!) And omg are there a lot of things to shoot. Wave after wave of scary demonic creatures shamble after you with swords and scythes and battle axes, and you have to fend them off with your trusty shotgun. It’s the fastest-paced game I’ve seen in a long time. It’s so fast-paced, in fact, that when I play it, my wrist hurts and I get dizzy. Cool stuff. And the bosses are old school, too. Back in the day, when you got to a boss creature, you knew it. The bosses in Painkiller tower over you and it takes like twenty tries to kill them.

It makes you think about what makes a shooter fun. More and more, game developers are trying to make shooters into big-budget action movie productions, where You Are In The Movie. There are (kind of) cohesive plots and storylines and characters and dialog (see F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 and Half-Life 2). That’s all fine, but sometimes we fans of the genre just want an arcade shoot-em-up.

I give Painkiller a 5… out of 5.

Related

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was converted from HTML to Markdown format before being built by Hugo. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to show them on the new site.

Sorry, new comments are disabled on older posts. This helps reduce spam. Active commenting almost always occurs within a day or two of new posts.