Painkiller (2025)

Playing this really shocked me. Spent 15 minutes sidling through the tutorial, which the game helpfully warned me was very important and should probably not be skipped. I felt it was technically competent, with some interesting elements, but it didn't really make sense as a game to me.

Maybe for the Doom 2016 fans, I thought. I was right on the edge of giving up after the tutorial, I was really doubting that I'd get anything out of actually playing it in coop.

We got in a lobby, selected a "raid". The stone pedestal I was standing on span around, taking me with it and surprising the shit out of me. We then booted into the raid, skipped the intro cutscene, and watched our player 3 bot flying around like a movement shooter zoomer with dodgy network interpolation.

It turns out that shooting guys in this game rocks. The stake gun seems to pick a random spot behind the guy you shot and just drags them over there, independent of the direction of the stake - it's unbelievably funny. You can dash or slide into massive groups of goons and send them flying, even with the two weapons of the demo you're just obliterating swathes of guys.

It taps into some of the Serious Sam esque scale of the original game, and in fact I think is quite faithful generally. Going from a singleplayer to a primarily multiplayer experience is a big departure, obviously. But they've adapted many of the ideas and themes surprisingly faithfully, if not directly. Stuff like grabbing coins, the tarot cards, weapons and their secondary fires. Each of the mini-campaigns ends with a giant boss fight - like in Painkiller. Even the movement options, dashing and sliding, though more modern are very much reminiscent of Painkiller's bunnyhopping.

Many of the levels are stunning. The gothic fantasy stuff usually isn't my favourite, but it's so well executed here and with enough variety that it's impossible not to appreciate. There are a lot of gorgeous vistas, as well as impressively detailed small assets. The levels themselves are solid, with some interesting arenas and objectives, as well as some secrets hidden away that are fun to explore.

I've dipped my toes into the roguelike mode, which seems to have a lot of completely new assets and new levels, rather than being another way to run through the campaigns. It's a cool way to re-contextualise the tarot cards and weapon upgrades too, and they seem to get a bit more experimental with the levels and objectives, which was nice after burning through the campaigns.

To summarize my thoughts, this is a thoroughly entertaining and well made game. It is shockingly faithful to Painkiller, excepting the obvious switch from singleplayer to live-service style multiplayer. I burned through nine hours of it on release day with a friend, and we encountered one bug (arena didn't register all the enemies being dead, fucking around for 5 minutes managed to fix it), and one serious performance problem (mysterious slowdown in one area that cleared up after a minute). The team is clearly extremely talented and the game deserves better than a goddamn mixed rating on Steam.