Painkiller: Hell & Damnation Review

Expectations. Every game has them coming out of the gate, but remakes and reboots have it even worse. In the case of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, a reboot of the original Painkiller and its expansion Battle out of Hell, it's less about these small details and more about the substance. Is the action still fast? Are the enemies stupid and plentiful? Are the weapons still ridiculously awesome? Yep, you bet, and... well, mostly.



You're Daniel Garner, a dead man commissioned by Death to collect souls in order to free his girlfriend from clutches of Hell. The plot is paper-thin B-movie material at best, and actor John St. John (best known as the voice of Duke Nukem) definitely phoned in some of his cheese-tastic lines as Garner. Fortunately, the plot doesn't matter -- Painkiller is about shooting insane demons, and only shooting insane demons.

Beautiful Nightmare

Hell & Damnation delivers the goods in both quality and quantity in that department. These are the types of monsters who'll charge into battle without a care in the world, so combat tactics generally involve a lot of circle-strafing, bunny hopping, and camping out in the corner of a room and letting the enemies come to you. Even though there are numerous ways to exploit their rush mentality, I never found it detracted from the joy of blowing them away. Thanks in part to large enemy variety -- evil monks, sword-wielding skeleton knights, demon children that set themselves on fire, killer clowns -- it never got old. If you could think up some form of evil creature from your nightmares that you want to shoot, chances are you'll find them in Hell & Damnation.


Purists will be glad to know that while Hell & Damnation mixes up a few things in level and boss design, it sticks close to the original's formula, in some cases to a fault. Several levels have been recreated with only a few minor tweaks, such as expanding the swamp marsh outside of the Orphanage and speeding up the enemies a bit inside the Cemetery. Developer The Farm 51 has done a great job updating the look of Painkiller to modern standards with the Unreal Engine 3's higher-quality shadows, lighting, and textures that help to bring an even more menacing look to the creatures and the environment. The Loony Park level, with its twisted carnival aesthetic, really benefits from the newer tech. However, the bonus Factory level is completely bug-ridden with scripting issues and frequently spawned me outside of the level area, so until that gets fixed with a patch I recommend you steer clear of that one.

Guns From Hell

Likewise, the weaponry is pretty much the same as the original 2004 arsenal, including the great shotgun-freeze gun combo that makes for some great freezing and shattering, and the rocket launcher/chain gun that combines two of the genre's staples into one, and of course the iconic Stake Gun that pins enemies to walls. Not all of these are ideal, in that some of the alt-fires don't compliment each other well. The sniper rod-launcher that fires grenades as its alt doesn't go as well together, and also feels like it duplicates the Stake Gun too closely. Hell & Damnation adds only one new weapon: the Soulcatcher, a device that shoots saw blades as its primary fire and sucks the souls out of nearby enemies with its alt, and I found that it held its own well.


The biggest disappointment with the weaponry is that when I pull the trigger, it rarely feels epic enough. Outside of the shotgun and rocket launcher nothing has much of a kick, and many weapons lack a significant muzzle flash to even let us know we're holding down the trigger. It's not terrible, it's just that the arsenal could have used a few tweaks and a lot more oomph to make these guns feel more powerful.

Big Dumb Evil

You need to feel powerful when going up against Painkiller's massive bosses. However, even though these are some of the largest and most intimidating enemies you'll fight in any shooter, like the giant flying fire-breathing demon, the poor AI makes them susceptible to getting stuck in the environment. When we're talking about a mass group of enemies I can understand why one or two of them might have trouble getting around corners and hallways, but when it's just one enemy in a level solely created for them, I expect it to navigate its world better than this. Partially because of that weakness, and partially because of general difficulty, they weren't too tough to defeat -- the only real challenge is beating them within an allotted time to win their special Tarot Card (a bonus system that allows you to enable special in-game powers like extra damage or slow down time).


Even after the main campaign is complete there's still a lot of game left. Not only can you play co-op through the main campaign (although I found that even on the second-highest difficulty mode co-op made Painkiller too easy, and we hit a few minor bugs), but there's a collection of multiplayer maps as well that feature the standard selection of capture the flag, deathmatch, and team deathmatch. There's also a misleadingly named survival mode that pits four players against endless waves of enemies -- even if you die, you respawn, so it's all about how many kills you can score before the timer expires. Yes, these are the same types of generic multiplayer modes you should expect to see, but it's not every day we get a fast-paced old-school approach for these modes.

I still want more Painkiller. I don't just mean playing through all of the levels again, but I wanted more enemies, larger levels, more epic bosses. That's not to suggest I wasn't satisfied, it was just that I didn't want the experience to end, and that speaks well of The Farm 51's ability to recreate the fun of old-school shooters. Hopefully we'll see more work from this young developer with even more blood, guts, and heavy metal.