During DailyGame’s first trip to E3, we walked into the LA Convention Center and were flat-out in awe. The bass-pounding speakers, the stories-high TV screens, the oddly dressed mascots … the Dreamcatcher Games booth. Crammed in the corner, behind the large displays of better-known publishers, sat four PC monitors demonstrating a new first-person shooter called Painkiller. At the time, we thought we were just in awe of being at E3. Then a funny thing happened: other people and publications started to take notice. They asked where Dreamcatcher happened to pick up such a good-looking title. They asked when they’d see the final version.
When Painkiller shipped, the game looked as good as ever, and its afterlife-themed plot was, like the Doom series, serviceable without getting in the way of the gameplay meat. As you can read in our PC review of Painkiller (review), the gameplay is as old-school first-person shooter as it gets: walk into a room, dish out the pain on various and sundry demons, enter the next room, rinse and repeat. Simplistic to some, the gameplay still managed to win over a cult following. And it’s just that success that Dreamcatcher hopes will follow the Xbox version of Painkiller when it hits stores in late February.
What really made the PC version of Painkiller fun, much like Half-Life 2, was the number of things its physics engine let gamers accomplish. This is, remarkably, the case with the Xbox version as well. Since Painkiller: Hell Wars is all about shooting, the physics aren’t as useful for solving puzzles as they are in Half-Life 2, but they’re still pretty entertaining when using the game’s weapons.
You won’t necessarily re-create the fun of the gravity guns in Half-Life 2 or Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (review), but you will find endless joy in using the spear gun. Publishers often talk about location-specific damage, where a bullet to the knee will take out an enemy’s leg, but in Painkiller; Hell Wars, location-specific damage is taken to a whole new level. Shoot an enemy’s shoulder with the spear gun, and the spear will jut out from his joint well past his demise, even if it takes several shots to kill him. Better yet, if the enemy is relatively weak, one shot from the spear will not only kill him, but will throw him against a wall and, if your aim is good, hang him up by his shoulder (or leg, or head, or hand, or…)like a side of demonic beef.
In the demo we played of Painkiller: Hell Wars, there are hundreds of enemies to hang in this manner, and the environments themselves provide hundreds of creative places to unleash the hurt. From castle-like interiors to New Orleans-like alleys, the environments provide plenty of action, plenty of ammunition and plenty of instances of “this is an Xbox game?” awe. High-end PC gamers will notice the graphical differences between the PC and Xbox versions of the game, but mid-range PC owners will likely notice little change. And that’s saying a lot, because for its time (in 2004), Painkiller was a great-looking game. Part of the reason Dreamcatcher was able to achieve such a faithful translation is because, at least in the levels we’ve played, the game’s environments aren’t quite as expansive as they were in parts of the PC version, which means there’s less environment to render at any one time. Part of it is also the seemingly long development time for the Xbox version, which has been long in the waiting.
Yet if the campaign and creativity in Painkiller: Hell Wars is as good as the demo we played, that long development cycle will have been worth the wait. And, if the entire game stays as true to the quality as the PC version, Painkiller: Hell Wars could be as solid a shooter as Doom 3 on the Xbox. Minus the fright factor.
— Jonas Allen
