Tech, multiplayer

Painkiller is quite an attractive game, with a good dynamic lighting system, impressive modeling and quality textures. Animations are detailed but repetitive – enemies rarely have more than one or two attacks. The physics and ragdoll deaths help compensate for this (especially in those delightful instances a stake impales a foe to a wall), but variety remains a problem. Since few levels have more than two or three kinds of enemies, the repetitive animations become glaringly obvious. In any other kind of shooter, such graphical shortcomings would kill the experience. Painkiller is more tolerable thanks to its style of play, thanks to the frequent, grisly mass deaths of your foes and the frantic pace. The game just never leaves you time to think, and when it does, you’re worrying about what’s next rather than what is wrong with the graphics.

The sound effects are crisp and clean with a strong musical score, which, thank God, has nothing to do with military marches or orchestral soundtracks. After so many World War II, special ops/counter-terrorism and other realistic games, the different music alone is a pleasure to here. Painkiller not only looks and plays completely different from Saving Private Ryan or a Tom Clancy novel, it sounds different, and that’s not a benefit to be underestimated.

Multiplayer

Where singleplayer turned out to be surprisingly pleasant, the multiplayer I found somewhat disappointing. It’s not that the Quake style of play is abhorrent – indeed not after so many years of CS, MoHAA and CoD – and Painkiller faithfully recaptures the feel. The game is fast, footsteps make no sound, maps are designed with gameplay in mind first and realism not at all, there are teleports and strafe jumping and rocket launchers.

Yet, perhaps the expectations were too high. For starters, the netcode isn’t quite as smooth as we might like it. Now we can’t be sure if this isn’t just overloaded servers, but too many online experiences were a frustration due to lag and warping. Another problem is the stake gun – it’s your starting gun. The stake gun launches projectiles at moderately high speed (a touch faster than the Quake rocket launcher), but it reloads very slowly, the stakes drop vertically over time, and it obviously has no splash damage.

Now, combine this weapon with the netcode, and you can imagine the problem. Hitting anyone becomes pot luck. You just fire, and hope that between the time the server knows you fired the stake and the place where you thought your enemy was, an act of divine intervention will occur and you’ll hit. It’s not necessarily this bad, and usually you can get a kill or two before your ammo runs out, but the stake gun is absolutely the worst weapon in the Painkiller arsenal for multiplayer. The namesake painkiller weapon itself is better in many situations.

This problem is all the more remarkable since the designers of the game are supposed Quakeworld fans, and should know why Quakeworld became more popular online than NetQuake – the lag. Why they decided the stake gun is a good starting weapon choice for internet multiplayer is a mystery to us. It should be quite a potent killing tool on LAN, but it’s hard to forgive this design decision.

Painkiller’s multiplayer is diversified with the addition of many different gameplay modes, like Stakematch which has players fighting only with the stake gun, but these optional play modes are more like Mutators from Unreal Tournament than actual mods. They provide flavor, but they don’t change the basic recipe of the game.

That recipe is simple: fast, silent, lethal. Fights in Painkiller rarely last more than two seconds, and you end up going through dozens of decisions in that crack of time. Where to move, where to aim, whether or not to jump, what weapon to switch to, what weapon mode to use? By the time you’re done, you’re already trying to remember where the health and armor are, and whether or not to pick up your dead opponent’s drop. Then you tune your ears in and listen for sounds like item pickups and jumps, to decide on the safest route to a nearby armor or health with which to replenish yourself. It is the very soul of Quake.