Painkiller: Overdose

The Good
I have to admit from the start I am a huge Painkiller fan. I have the original game sitting proudly on my ‘all-time favourites’ list here at Moby.

For me, it was, and still is, the epitome of the run & gun shooter. The level set-pieces were interesting and well-varied, the action suitably unrelenting, black tarot cards added a cool twist, and the secrets were so often ludicrously hard to discover - all of these elements favourably contributed to the games’ immense manic charm. Followed quickly by the slick expansion pack 'Battle out of Hell' this carried on from where the original left off with all new content, and continued the same high-standard of design & polish, though not without some newly added quirks - chiefly some rather irksome nonlogical puzzle bits.

Now we have the latest entry in the series, Painkiller Overdose. This game began life as a Czechoslovakian fan-made mod TC called ‘Project Overdose’ though along the way was picked up by Dreamcatcher Interactive, and subsequently was given complete technical & financial backing.

In Overdose, instead of playing as Daniel Garner, the hapless protagonist from the prior games, You play a half-angel, half-demon called Belial. The premise sees Belial having been locked away in a cage of torment for centuries. Upon being unduly released from his prison, subsequently he wants to take revenge on the ones who put him in there in the first place. This sets up proceedings for the served straight-up style of classic frenetic mayhem fans know and love.

If you have never player Painkiller before, then flee the computer right now, and track down a copy and be happy . . er, um, . . are you still there? Good. Sorry about that, I got a bit excited there for a moment. The basic execution for Painkiller is firmly part of the Serious Sam canon. You run into an area, a wall closes you in from behind, and then a whole bunch of hideous nasties appears seemingly from nowhere, and you must blast them all to bloody-chunks in order to do it all over again until the credits roll down. A staple of Painkiller has always been the ability to consume the fallen nasties souls in order to replenish your health reserve, and Overdoes rapturously carries on the tradition. During all the kinetic havoc you also collect gold coins which you can use to buy special powers (re black tarot cards) which will give you a decided edge over the armies of evil spawn. Goals are presented in order to unlock these cards, for example, keeping your health quota above fifty points for the whole duration of a level, or clearing a level in a tight pre defined time limit. The rewards are like being able to become completely invulnerable to enemy attacks for a limited period at will, or even bringing you back from the dead after being snuffed. Of course, obtaining certain cards will make earning future cards easier to achieve, and so on.

From the outset, Overdose evoked, at least for me, the sort of delivery of humour from the most popular of the old BUILD engine games like Duke Nukem 3D, and its later ilk. When the first level kicks off, Belial dispenses a wisecrack straight off the bat, and from this point the game already had a markedly different tone than the previous Painkiller games. The pop-culture jokes from well-known horror movies couldn’t help but make me smile, while some of the other more broad & silly one-liners were a bit much. It all depends on personal taste really.

In terms of action, Overdose delivers what it promises. That is, there is a genuine surplus of carnage. The nasties are plenteous, and the arsenal appropriately tears through them like a hot knife through butter. Though the game claims six all new weapons, most are simply tweaked reworks of the already existing arsenal. But why change from the classics? The shotgun has been given a new ‘skeletal’ look, renamed ‘Bone Gun’ and ammo-packs are now represented as a sack of bones rather than buckshot shell boxes. The freezer alt fire has been replaced by a ‘petrify’ function more akin to the medusa gun from Will Rock. Some others like the sniper bolt gun, and the rocket launcher/machine gun combo have had subtle power changes, and visual redesigns. Aside from the cosmetic updates, it all works about the same. But this is fine with me. One decent addition worth noting is the ‘Demon Head’ which was torn from the guard of Belials prison. This weapon works like a rail laser (a new weapon in Hell Wars), and also has a handy alt fire which literally screams’ to bring down masses of enemies.

With the new levels of Overdose, it is really a mixed bag in terms of quality. I genuinely enjoyed some of them, but others were definitely so-so. One entitled ‘Animal Farm’ was rather interesting, which had a decidedly Redneck Rampage feel about it. There was even a pile of dung in barrows which would cause you to trudge if you decided to step into it for whatever reason! Here you contended with demonic explosive chickens, Pig-men in aprons with saws for hands’ in meat freezers, and even had a final showdown in some very authentic fifties style Diner. Another sees you battling with Vikings through snowy villages in ‘Ragnarok’ or even a very Shadow Warrior-esque encounter in ‘Japanese Massacre’. I think there are some nice odes to past games’ which fans of these titles should appreciate.

Shooter purists will be happy to know the Guardian battles in Overdose have returned back to the traditional “Hammer the weak spot(s) until it keels over” philosophy of play, as opposed to the often frustratingly complicated puzzle-structured boss battles presented in BooH.

From a visual standpoint, Overdose uses the same ‘Pain’ engine as the original, though there is the odd Direct X 9c bell or whistle put on. While perhaps not at the bleeding edge of tech anymore, it remains a very nice engine, and the benefit is of course you can get very respectable performance from a modest hardware configuration. Some of the special visuals touch like soft shadows on the desert level complimented by subtle heat haze effects, or even the snow blizzards on Ragnarok would complete the suspension of disbelief at times for the sheer amount of rich detail.

The Bad
Though, on occasion the system was brought to its knees by some of the weather routines - chiefly dense fogging, or anomaly effects, which would usually be the culprits. Apart from that, only if there was a huge amount of activity on the screen, e.g. rag-dolls flying in all directions, huge explosions, and ever more spawning nasties, there might be a slight momentary pause during the action - but that’s it. Though you would think some of these hiccups could, and should have been ironed out of the engine by this point.

Another problem which has always afflicted the Painkiller games is slow load times. Quite unfortunately, this remains true for this outing. You can expect to wait some times up to & more than thirty seconds for some levels to load, and that is a long time to wait during the course of play, especially when you just want to get straight back into it. Of course the flip side to this is it will most likely force you to try just that bit harder to stay a float.

I have to be brutally honest by saying that design-wise, Overdoes isn’t up to the previous Painkiller entries. The environments are so often relentlessly flat, which in turn makes your progression rather an uneventful-trod from one checkpoint to the other most of the time. The previous games’ had maps with far more intricacies which complimented the action with interesting level advancement. The secret areas to discover aren’t a fraction as much clever or devious on the same token. On more than one occasions a secret-place was just finding an ammo-crate or Holy item just sitting smack-dab in the centre of the level, not obstructed by anything. On top of this seemingly indifferent design mind set, there aren’t nearly as many secrets to find per level. A few of the levels don’t even have any secret places, and the ones that do usually will only have one or two. I thought this to be rather out-of-tune for a Painkiller game.

Some of the newly added weapons are rather flaky. For example, the ‘Shadow Blade’ - which is this broken-sword thing which you throw in a straight line, and the nasties sort of just flail over when hit. I don’t know, it was a bit dull for my taste. I felt the same about the ‘Demon Egg’ this you would throw out kind of like the pipe bombs in Duke 3D, though instead of a proper explosion, these things’ splat into a toxic green mess. These new implements just lack the raw ferocity of the standard weapons, and I found myself rarely using them personally.

There are no new Black Tarot cards to speak of. Even the goals’ to unlock them has been recycled from the original game. This goes for the monsters’ in the game as well, while some have been remodelled, too much I felt was recycled. A lot of content has been reused from both prior games’ which contributes to a niggling feeling that the game was rushed to completion.

The Bottom Line
As a certifiable Painkiller fanatic, I was really hanging out for Overdose. This is why I was so disappointed to find it isn’t quite up to mustard. Obviously Mindware Studios isn’t People Can Fly, and the end result feels decidedly half-baked at best. If Overdose was the free fan-made mod it was originally intended to be I would say it was a great effort, but as a fully-produced commercial product it falls well short of expectations. This is my biassed opinion of course, and my final words are that the carnage still thankfully retains the classic Painkiller stamp of style, and the subtle nods to past shooters will most likely delight real fans of the genre. So, it gets my swollen OK.