Final Verdict

Painkiller has a solid singleplayer design with subtle appeal that isn’t likely to be very broad. It’s not as frantic as Serious Sam, there’s more thinking involved especially with the boss and mini-boss characters. It accomplishes what it sets out to do, but little else. Along the way, the repetitive enemies, few of whom are as creative as Serious Sam’s, do a lot of harm to the suspension of disbelief.


Being FiringSquad, however, we were more concerned with the multiplayer and came away very impressed, but bleeding from two sore spots. For a game that so faithfully manages to recapture the spirit of Quake, that comes away with good level design (always troublesome) and some very interesting weapons, it’s painful to see the developers make two major mistakes. The stake gun and painkiller are simply useless in multiplayer, and they’re your starting weapons. This is as poorly thought out as id giving the blaster as the weapon in Quake II.


As fans of the genre and devoted Quake players, People Can Fly should know of the importance of the starting weapons and especially the netcode, which is our other problem. It is vastly improved over what we tested in the alpha, so clearly some thought went to it, but the success rate for good online servers is only 20%. With a figure that low, we must assume this is the developer’s fault.

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