You can tell a lot about a game by the guns it has on offer. If I tell you that Painkiller lets you blast zombies with a stake gun, which also doubles up as a grenade launcher, the mental image you're already forming of the FPS will be mostly on-point.
Painkiller is a co-op shooter in a similar vein to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, where you depart on single-instance missions to earn currency, which is then spent on your guns, upgrades, and stat modifiers back at your base. It's a genre where the bar for sensibilities is low. You turn up to have fun with pals, whether you're laughing with the game or at it. Combining that with a Doom-style setting where you suspend your disbelief to feel oh-so cool should be a winning formula. But it's a little more nuanced than that.
High stakes
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Painkiller is a co-op shooter in a similar vein to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, where you depart on single-instance missions to earn currency, which is then spent on your guns, upgrades, and stat modifiers back at your base. It's a genre where the bar for sensibilities is low. You turn up to have fun with pals, whether you're laughing with the game or at it. Combining that with a Doom-style setting where you suspend your disbelief to feel oh-so cool should be a winning formula.
In part, Painkiller gets this – and a few other areas – right. A gun that shoots stakes – easy win! It's one of the few games where I enjoy the weapon upgrades on offer, too. While I'll usually flit through these systems and amicably nod through anything that makes Number Go Up, Painkiller offers genuinely game-changing options. The Stakegun, for example, can be tweaked to fire burrowing drills; meaning you can shoot a shield-toting demon and the projectile will dig through their shield to the soft flesh behind it. Likewise, the shuriken-firing Electrodriver can be upgraded with bouncing shurikens, transforming the gun into a specialized weapon for dealing with crowds.
But one of my biggest issues with Painkiller is that it doesn't make much effort to accommodate solo players. That's fair – it's a co-op game first and foremost – but while most modern co-op shooters either make running with pals mandatory or flesh out NPC allies to make them serviceable, Painkiller is trapped in that weird 2010-era sentiment where bots really sucked.
Being downed in a fight usually spells the end of your run because at that point, the bots on your team are almost certainly down already – not that they're much help in life. Playing alone is theoretically possible as you can ping these companions to pull essential levers and stand on pressure plates to unlock gates, but from my own solo runs I'd suggest being absolutely certain you'll be playing with buddies before diving further into Painkiller.
But even with pals, Painkiller feels oddly floaty. Guns just don't feel very impactful, and that goes double against special-type demons. While they can be stunned and executed using elemental damage, their stun bars typically last longer than your resource-limited elements can be fired for, turning them into regular bullet sponges. Even movement feels iffy, with features like dashes and wall-climbing a little spoiled by regularly clipping with enemies.
I'll caveat all of this with the fact that Painkiller doesn't launch until October 9, so there's a chance that some of these shortcomings could (and hopefully are) buffed out before release. I hope they are, because Painkiller is at its best when you're moving fast with your trigger permanently held down. It feels brilliant to dash away from a crowd of shambling thralls, buying enough room to spin on your heels and spray shurikens into your pursuers before rinsing and repeating – being frozen and killed by the killer combination of a larger demon and stairs feels less good.
Less fixable is Painkiller's permeating snark. While Painkiller wants to relish in the same excess and near-silliness as Doom and Quake, it makes the cardinal sin of trying to acknowledge it's a bit silly. The playable characters are unbearably quippy – as are the oddly sassy leaders of Hell – making the game's personality very hard to click with.
The whole package adds up into something reminiscent of an Xbox 360-era shooter – the real thing, not an intentional callback – and if that sounds like something you'd want to blast through with friends, I can see Painkiller scratching that specific itch. While it currently feels like Painkiller needs more time in the oven, I'm hoping to give it another shot at launch – because if it can bring out more of the over-the-top thrills that shooting demons with stakes should offer, I can already see myself beseeching pals to play with me. The gun – it shoots stakes!
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