Like the first Painkiller, Painkiller: Resurrection is a beautiful game with a classic first-person shooter feel. I’m talking Duke Nukem, Quake and Doom classic here. The game even brings back the bunny hop (where you move faster when jumping, so players constantly hop to move as quickly as possible).
While the game does have a story (you’ve gone to purgatory), the real focus is the classic feel of one man versus that never-ending hoard of evil. Your weapons come in locked pairs, and you start with the classic “painkiller,” a spinning triple blade of melee mayhem and a trip-line laser that gives a straight line of site ranged attack.
What makes the laser better is your ability to use it to juggle enemies for more drops, timing your shots to keep them airborne as long as possible. Weapons also work in conjunction. If you start the painkiller a spinnin’ you can tap the laser and send the blades off as a flying fan of flesh fileting fun that streaks off and cuts through a row of enemies before reattaching at your arm.
In single-player mode, you fight through the hoards at your choice of difficulty. Collect 66 souls to enter Demon mode (you know, that thing where the colors change and you do more damage for a few seconds and more or less transform from a simple hoard-killing hero to an ultimate ass-kicking machine). Find hidden items to unlock Tarot cards, which give you special abilities. You can have three cards equipped: one active and two passive. Actives might be a super attack once per, while passives give you things like higher max health. Careful, though: It costs gold to switch them.
Now, no first-person shooter would be complete without multiplayer features. Painkiller: Resurrection introduces Voosh mode, in which players are forced to cycle through weapon pairs every 60 seconds. No longer is it enough to be the best camper with the rocket launcher; you’ve got to master all the weapons. The game will also feature classics like capture the flag and elimination all for up to 32 players. I was also told they were working on a co-op mode (not for 32 players, sorry).
They showed me all the exciting lighting effects. They showed me the cool way things were rendered and told me about how the game runs at 60 frames per second. I was too busy watching how cool it looked. What really did stick out for me was when they lifted the table cloth and showed me that while they had some awesome powerful computers, the game was actually running seamlessly from a pretty run-of-the-mill laptop.
If you’re like me and miss when first-person shooters were about shooting (and not secret missions or sneaking behind enemies for hours trying not to be seen) and overcoming overwhelming odds with fantastical weapons ... check out Painkiller: Resurrection. The controls are simple, the objectives are straightforward and action is nonstop.
