Retroview - Painkiller: Black Edition

Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/3200/
Source: Youtube Channel GOGcom

A month ago, I finally got around to finishing Painkiller.  As I've mentioned in a past post about the series, I had seen a pack sold on Steam for the longest time but neglected it until I saw all 4 games sold together for $5 and decided to get the game to mindlessly shoot things when I needed to relax.  Well, I got what I wanted and went through about 10 hours of bunny hopping and shooting monsters in the face.  Painkiller, originally developed by People Can Fly, is a first-person shooter where the main character is sent to hell to fight off Lucifer and his minions to have the rights to return to heaven to his wife who died alongside the main character in a car crash.  The game is fast-paced with hordes of enemies swarming the player.  The game mechanics work similarly to Quake and Unreal in that the guns don't require aiming down sight, the player can jump far, high and quickly consistently, and mowing down rows of enemies isn't a problem as long as the player doesn't die.  What the developers tried to achieve in the design of the game is having the constant pressure of enemies constantly after the player so that the player doesn't really have enough time to think but rather reacts instinctively.  For the most part, the game was entertaining and had incredible environments that made certain moments memorable.  The game is repetitive and mostly involves hopping around to avoid gunfire and shooting enemies with various weapons.  The only time where it wasn't just shooting enemies is boss battles where it's more of a puzzle than a real fight (except against Lucifer which was a difficult and the most memorable boss fight).  It's amazing playing the game now since the game was released back in 2004 but had a lot of interesting level and concept designs that kept the player on edge.  People Can Fly had moved on from the game while it was passed from one developer to another only to receive a lower score on Metacritic with each passing game.  I haven't got around to installing the 2nd in the series, but I suppose I'll get around to it one day.  It was a good distraction from the FPS we have today since it played so differently.