There’s an old joke that says heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are French, the weapons are from Blood, the movement is from Quake, and the personality is from Doom. I may have gotten a bit mixed up there but I’m fairly certain that hell looks something like Painkiller. The visuals are from Quake 2, the enemies are from Serious Sam, and the movement is from Counter Strike, it forms such a perfect palette of blandness that’s almost shocking to experience. Instead of feeling like an arena shooter, it’s more like a courtyard shooter, with all the hallmarks that make the genre enjoyable scaled down to a level that feels almost pitiful. Instead of flying around layered battlefields like in Quake, you walk from flat square to flat square, doing a limp sort of bunny hopping to speed the process up. There’s never a time where you walk into a room and get surprised by the type of enemies waiting for you, they usually just spawn in one-by-one, and the majority are forgettable melee-only chaff to be dispersed in a single hit. The only time you’re required to really think is when searching for the last enemy of a horde, since you aren’t allowed to progress to the next room until every single enemy has been defeated, even when they tend to get hung up on doorways and obstructions. The compass points in their general direction, but if you didn’t notice that a few enemies are running in circles on top of a nearby rooftop, you’ll be left wondering if the game just broke. That’s something that tends to happen a lot in this game, as I had multiple save corruptions that would crash my game whenever I attempted to load. Sometimes I could load a corrupted save, but from that point, trying to save in any form would cause a crash, including the automatic checkpoints. It took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening there and delete all the corrupted saves, so it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the majority of times I launched the game were when trying to recover from a crash.

Honestly, this is one of the rare times I have nothing nice to say about a game. The closest it gets is with its unique alternate fire-modes like the ones from Blood, but the enemy reactions are so devoid of personality and the ammo pickups are so unreliable that I hardly noticed their presence at all. The story is peak 2000’s supernatural schlock, the protagonist is totally unlikable, the bosses are all confusingly bad, I really can’t recommend this game to anyone. If you haven’t played Blood or its recent port, Fresh Supply, I would go check that out instead. It’s bursting with personality, and it was able to pack in much more fun and challenge than Painkiller was able to manage with every possible technical advantage.