Every now and then, some suit at a publisher looks at a beloved series they own, realizes they could make it into a live service co-op game, and says, out loud, “I know this has never worked for anyone else, but it might work for us.” It never does, of course; it makes the original fanbase angry, and oftentimes the franchise is old enough that new players don’t even know what it is. The result is a game for no one, a whole lot of nothing driven by market forces and the deluded belief that somehow, some way, this time the idea is just better than all of the previous times it’s been tried. This time, they, chosen by God, will be immune from whatever effects have frustrated lesser mortals. The latest game in this doomed genre is Painkiller, a reboot of People Can Fly’s 2004 cult classic, and the result is the same as it ever was. It’s fitting that it takes place in Purgatory. When it is consigned to the graveyard of history, its headstone will read “Here lies Painkiller, neither good enough to get into heaven nor bad enough to be damned to the inferno. You’ll wish you’d just played the original and called it a day, or simply booted up the Judas Priest song instead.”
This new Painkiller is one of those co-op games. You know the ones; a brief tutorial frontloads the meager plot, shows you the ropes and unlocks your base of operations. Once established, you pick from one of four visually-distinct-but-aside-from-one-passive-ability-virtually-identical-characters, all of whom come with pre-packaged quips that mostly sound like they were written by Dollar Store Joss Whedon. After selecting your weapons and loadout, you choose one of several missions, where you go to a place and kill a lot of bad guys, then return to your base with the spoils, where you can upgrade your stuff, and do it all again. You have seen all of this before, and I’m already bored describing it.
The story here is basically nonexistent. You are one of four souls stuck in Purgatory – Ink, Void, Roch, and Sol – approached by the disembodied voice of the angel Metatron to stop the demon Azazel, another faceless voice, from Doing Something Bad. Go on mission, go home, spend spoils, repeat. To Painkiller's infinite credit, there is no paid currency or battle pass here, just a Season Pass with skins and the like, But the loop never varies – once you get New and Better Stuff, it's just time to go do whatever Metratron determines needs doing next.
“That really doesn’t sound like Painkiller,” you might say if you played the original – and you, reader, you win the solid gold Kewpie doll, because it isn’t like Painkiller at all! If you squint, you can see the inspirations, though I use this term loosely. There are tarot cards, though you “win” a selection of them by spending gold in the Tarot Lottery because everything about video games is gambling now (even if you’re not spending real money), and equip them before missions for bonuses like +50 health and 30% more damage. Once the mission is over, your tarot cards are used up and you either have to spend more gold in the lottery or Ancient Souls, which you earn during missions, to restore one you’ve previously used. You can also use these currencies to buy and upgrade weapons, and you generally won’t have enough to do that and have tarot cards early on.
This isn't a Painkiller game; it's Warhammer 40k: Darktide wearing a Painkiller suit.Speaking of, much of the original game’s iconic arsenal has been resurrected here like the Stakegun and Electrodriver, complete with their amusing alt fires. However, the titular Painkiller (which you always have) is now doing its best impression of Doom Eternal’s chainsaw, there to get you more ammo when your other guns run out. Sometimes, levels will lock you into a large, usually circular or rectangular space and make you kill a lot of enemies, though none of them are as visually striking or bats**t insane as the original rogues’ gallery. The similarities end there. This is not a Painkiller game; it is Warhammer 40,000: Darktide wearing a Painkiller skin suit, and hoping nobody cares enough to notice.
Painkiller looks good, but its problems really come down to mission design. Environments feel samey even when they look different, and each of the three acts (which are three levels apiece) finds a single gameplay idea and never lets go of it. Your progress will be stopped by something and the only way through will be Doing That Act’s Mechanic: in the first, that means filling barrels with blood by killing enemies near them and then slotting those into the proper place; in the second, you’ll need to find and use soul containers to power things; in the third, you’ll have to stand on ritual markers to activate dreamcatchers.
Occasionally, Painkiller will mix it up a bit – I actually liked the spots where my team had to use the soul containers to power a large cart we had to escort, but moments like that are rare. Mostly, you do the same things over and over again, moving through the environments, collecting gold, finding hidden chests, and picking up consumables –one plops down health; another plops down ammo; the third is a mostly useless decoy you will never pick up unless the other two are not available; and the fourth is an extra life; that’s it. You’re then locked into a combat arena until you either get enough blood canisters/soul containers/dreamcatchers to proceed or everything barring your path is dead.
Even the combat isn’t as satisfying as it should be. Most enemies are cohorts, harmless by themselves but potentially dangerous in large numbers (and they always come in large numbers) that die easily. There are also larger, more dangerous demons you can stagger by pouring on alt fires or kill outright, and the end of act Nephilim, who serve as bosses. None of these are all that engaging aside from the Nephilim, and while there are several different kinds of cohorts and a handful of demons, none of them have much of a unique visual identity. There are no Psychonuns or Hell Bikers or Evil Samurai or Freaks, nothing that made the original game’s wacky evil ensemble memorable. No, this is Purgatory by way of a heavy metal album cover if it were generated by AI. If you’re going to do Painkiller, it could at least look like Painkiller, you know?
It's Purgatory by way of a heavy metal album cover if it were generated by AI.Perhaps most infuriatingly, Painkiller isn’t out and out bad. The movement is fast, precise, and a hell of a time – you can slide, dash, air dash, dash through enemies, bounce off walls for a double jump, and use the Painkiller to grapple to various anchor points (or enemies!). All six of the guns, whether it’s the Electrodriver, Rocket Launcher, Hand Cannon, Stakegun, Shotgun, or SMG, feel great, and I liked messing around with the various alt fires. A shotgun that freezes enemies so I can shatter them? Neat. A Stakegun that’s also a grenade launcher or can create a gravity well? Love it. Turning the Rocket Launcher into a minigun that shoots rockets that freeze? Sign me up. And getting a new upgrade on a weapon’s branching paths feels meaningful and changes how you play. Yeah, a lot of it is “we have Doom Eternal at home,” but if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from the best.
I even came to enjoy the characters, particularly Sol, a haughty, eternally youthful priestess, and Void, a straight man with a self-described fishbowl for a head and no memory of his past. Even Ink’s sarcasm and self-loathing and Roch’s tragic backstory aren’t poorly written, really. (The bad stuff is reserved for in-combat dialogue.) The issue is you rarely get to hear them finish telling each other their stories because you’ll run into some enemies and the background heavy metal (which is good) will kick in, or another character will spout some inane combat dialogue and the story dialogue you were hearing will just stop dead and never resume. Yeah, you can read it in the codex at your home base, but it’s not voiced, and the voice cast does admirable work with what they have. Bummer.
The boss fights against the Nephilim are pretty good, too. They’re not groundbreaking – you’ve seen a lot of these mechanics before – but they’re engaging to play and they look cool, whether it’s a massive blood rat, a big statue hiding a secret, or a literal dragon. These are the best parts of the roughly four or so hours it takes to play straight through Painkiller’s Raid (read: campaign) mode, and a nice change of pace from the “we’re not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with us” standard encounters.
Painkiller is designed as a three-player co-op game, and that’s the best way to play it, but if you’re short on friends or nobody’s around online, the bots are pretty good and respond well to player commands. Ordering them to stand on a switch to open a secret area is less intuitive than one of your co-op partners seeing the switch and just doing it, but it works, and I didn’t mind playing with bots when no one else was on.
Disappointment still manages to creep in, though. I figured Painkiller’s blink-and-you’ll-miss it plot was setting us up for a showdown with Azazel when we finished all nine levels, but nope. You just get access to his empty tomb where his voice offers you the chance to work for him. Your character naturally declines and he pivots to offering, and I kid you not, this is an actual line of dialogue, “a higher difficulty” and the opportunity for more violence and chaos. Sure, Azazel, why not? I’m already having so much fun.
There is also a roguelike mode to try out, and I enjoyed it because, unlike the Raid levels, there’s a lot more variety, and you can take your rewards back with you. You might navigate a platforming segment between fights that hurts you for as long as you’re in it or have to bring soul canisters up to the top of a ziggurat. Even the “we’re gonna lock you in a combat arena until either everything else is dead or all of you are” bits are more fun here just because you haven’t seen these environments before, and the randomized nature of your weapons, alt fires, and tarot cards feels more natural. It’s like this is what the Painkiller reboot was supposed to be before someone decided it should have a campaign, too. Unfortunately, during my first roguelike run, my game crashed. Talk about being damned.
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