Painkiller: Hands-On Preview

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People Can Fly has decided to take an interesting “less is more” approach when it comes to weapons and enemies. Instead of bombarding the player with 10+ guns, you instead have only five, but each has an alternate and unique firing mode. The minigun, for example, doubles as a rocket launcher. The machine gun is also a grenade launcher, and so on. This means that there will be less of the constant weapon switching many shooters are famous for. Don’t let those few mundane weapons guns fool you; there are plenty of more “interesting” devices in your employ as well. There’s the steak-gun, especially handy for nailing baddies to nearby walls, (from which they then hang limp in a great display of the Havok 2.0 physics engine.) Then there’s what I can only describe as a four-bladed rotating scythe staff, which grinds up demons faster than you can say, “Yahtzee!” Its alternate fire is also quite useful. The head of the weapon shoots off and embeds itself in the first hard object it hits. A beam then shoots back to the player, and any unfortunate souls caught in the beam are quickly killed. If the head hits an enemy before it does a wall, that enemy is immediately gibbed, creating an awe-inspiring shower of limbs and blood. It’s enough to bring a smile to anyone’s face. It sure did mine.

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Painkiller uses the proprietary PAIN engine, developed by People Can Fly. This is some seriously impressive technology, which seems to be able to render extremely detailed environments and characters at a blisteringly fast framerate. Even this relatively build of Painkiller looks and plays better than a great deal of games on the market today, (Deus Ex: Invisible War comes to mind.) I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see other developers license the PAIN engine – it’s that good. Coupled with Havok 2 physics, Painkiller manages to create a very believable game world. Audio consists of subtle ambient music while exploring, and heavy adrenaline rock during shootouts. Each enemy has their own identifiable sound, as do weapons.