I think it's safe to assume that overdoses are pretty bad things. Nasty, life-ending tragedies at worst; perspective-altering near misses that usually result in a hospital stay at best. Odd, then, that People Can Fly, developers of the well-received 2004 FPS Painkiller, have chosen to name their latest title after something so undoubtedly unpleasant - but then again, the original game revolved around killing Lucifer's generals in a selection of gruesome locales.

Unfortunately, this semi-sequel, coming three years after the original title, tends to inhabit the worst excesses of the overdose: it's dizzy, confused, and there's way too much of it. This overdose is experiencing an unpleasant bout of overkill. That's not to say it's a bad game, and it'll sate you for a fair few hours if you're looking for some Serious Sam-style mindless.

Graphically, Overdose is a great looking game, especially seeing as it's built in an engine that first saw the light of day in 2004. The various environments that you encounter in this standalone game-cum-expansion pack are visceral and exciting to be around, although perhaps lacking some of the smart design that made the original game such a hectic blaster. Nevertheless, Overdose runs you through a variety of suitably hellish surrounds: typically generic castles, Japanese areas and science fiction worlds get the Overdose treatment.

This also extends to the range of enemies you'll face and the new weapons that you're given to wreak havoc with. Foes may still attack you in limited ways - they crawl, stumble, run or walk at you - and it's simply your job to blast the living daylights out of them. They're a nasty bunch, too, evidently requiring quite a bit of warped imagination to create.

The guns are suitably powerful, with new armaments quite obviously torn from the same over-the-top mould that made Doom such a success and such an inspiration for the Painkiller games. The Hell Cube, for instance, unfolds into a series of sharp blades, the Bone Gun is, well, a shotgun with bones, and there's Wild West-style weaponry filled with radioactive waste. They're all hugely exaggerated and huge fun, especially when you see the results on your prey.

The gameplay is reminiscent of a roller-coaster: short, exciting, and packed with primal thrills that may shock to the core but lack any real depth. The game does receive a structure of sorts thanks to the fact that the blasting action is split up into plenty of arenas. This, though, works as a double-edged sword: the fact that Overdose is divided into plenty of short sections makes the game swift and injects plenty of pace into your blasting - in fact, it's a throwback to the old Genesis-era hit Smash TV, which saw your character locked into an arena and tasked with destroying everything in sight. This was a game, though, released in 1990, and so while it's true that Overdose, the modern equivalent, will entertain, it won't hold a candle to the expansive and impressive FPS titles released over the past twelve months because of the lack of continuity and narrative between the levels.

Despite this, there's plenty to still recommend. As a brainless blaster, you won't find anything to match Painkiller: Overdose unless you go back a few years and dig out Serious Sam or its sequels. Unfortunately, though, that's all that the latest in the Painkiller franchise is. The graphics may be pretty and the imagination may be running rampant, but that can't save the game from the fact it's a rehashing of 18-year-old ideas. Fun for a while, then, but don't expect any lasting satisfaction from a game that's over so quickly.