By Tracey McGarrigan
Most of us will have spent the past week finishing off the last gummy treats from spooky Halloween celebrations, watching fireworks in the dark or sipping hot choc in the evenings whilst watching the new influx of Christmas adverts as autumn grows ever colder. Spare a thought then for Daniel Garner who since Halloween has found himself trapped between heaven and hell in a never-ending battle against all things demonic. If he ever wants to see the light of his life, Catherine, ever again, he’s going to have to run a mighty errand for a big red faced chap with horns and tiny glowing eyes. Armed with a whirly gun that has three whirring blades to plough into the stomachs and faces of oncoming foes (aptly named the Painkiller gun), Daniel must collect 7000 souls or face eternal damnation in purgatory.
The opening levels, set in a darkened, dusty graveyard with hoards of skeletons and witches rising up from their tombs are relentlessly chaotic and quite tense with the undead circling Daniel, dashing towards him with grim vigour as a heavy metal soundtrack thrashes over the top, leaving my head and heart frantically throbbing long after the power was switched off. Each area has a wave of enemies to fell, after which, follows an eerie quietness broken only by faint scratchy pencil noises or creepy funfair-esque chimes before CRASH, the next wave appears, the guitars flare up, drums rumble and all hell breaks loose again. This ebb and flow for the most part works really well, offering small pauses in the action. This rhythm however quickly becomes familiar, there are copious numbers of conveniently placed ammo boxes, save points are close together and new weapons are easily won which eases the difficulty somewhat. Different guns are more effective against different baddies and switching between guns on the fly with the mouse scroll button allows for constant gunning whilst most reload speeds were just as zippy. This worked well enough in the early sections when facing multiple baddies but in the later stages, scrolling through my gun collection felt more like watching the agonisingly slow Generation Game conveyor belt and it’s so frustrating to have no melee option, especially when a gaggle of evil Pinocchio’s crowd round, stabbing you with extended noses (which the whirly gun has little effect on). Michael Jackson has nothing on Daniel Garner as he makes walking backwards to gain enough space to shoot enemies an art form.
There are other flaws dotted throughout the game that I also found impacted on the pace. Having to wait ages for bullet ridden bodies to turn into green souls, even with the soul gun’s ability to suck up the green orbs from afar is tedious (although the gun does also come with the ability to shoot spinning saw blades, making it an excellent choice when stopping larger foes in their tracks with a well-aimed shot to their kneecaps…). In some of the larger areas, hunting down stragglers in order to proceed to the next level can be a bit of a time consuming task too. Whenever Daniel manages to bag 66 souls, he becomes a rampaging demon, shooting red firey balls of death into inky figures as his vision turns white hot; this bonus doesn’t last long and sadly can’t be activated when most needed. Perhaps the overseers of Hellish game design decided this would make the game too easy? That players would save up their demon power until they needed an edge when squaring up to the big bosses and give Daniel too much of a fighting chance but for me it would have added a neat level of control and ranked up the ‘cool’ factor.
There is a PvP multiplayer section too that I found quite dull and didn’t play much of after the single player campaign where despite all the frustrations, slugging weird S&M dressed monks in vast gothic cathedrals or ninja gas mask wearing ant-men through twisted subway stations or big bulbous butted slobs in an opulent opera house or knife-wielding urchins in an orphanage was damn fun!
Painkiller: Hell and Damnation is perhaps more akin to eating a pack of Ibuprofen than being hooked up to a Morphine drip but for a short burst of gruesome gunning, is definitely worth prescribing.
Painkiller: Hell and Damnation is out now on PC and will be available on console January 2013.
