Painkiller Resurrection is sold as being the next awesome...sequel...kind of with better graphics and the best weapons of the series.
Unfortunately, it seems that those are either lies or embellished. I don't know if all of the best weapons are back. I'll assume so, but I didn't finish the game so I wouldn't know.
Load times - Horrible. I thought it kept freezing up from time to time. But letting it sit for 4 minutes seemed to make it finish loading at one point.
Level Design - Horrible. I was so confused that I literally spent longer trying to figure out where I'm supposed to go next. And backtracking seems to be something that the play is supposed to understand that they must constantly do. For instance on the first level I finally killed a bunch of demons on the bottom and top floor. Starting from the bottom, you'd think the exit is on top. Nope. Its on the bottom floor. At least they kept that compass. No big deal, except the exist had a bunch of boards on it. After figuring out that I had to still walk up to it and then slide around it I was in the chapel on the top floor.
I killed everything, found a secret room that I couldn't get to, because I can't crouch. Then run downstairs, kill some more creatures and then I don't know where to go now. So I run back upstairs, kill more, run back downstairs and kill more...again that weren't there before either. Then I get my checkpoint and look around until I find a crack in the wall that looks like I can go through it, but its small like the secret room entrance. But I make it through.
The tunnel then is disorienting and random seeming because I think you are constantly changing walking on the ceiling and the floor. Then looking up top to a hole to which you sort of jump up a wall to. And then I'm at a dead end, though I did find another secret room.
I back track back to the chapel and now its upside down and on fire... alright, so I proceed to kill everything and can't figure out how to go to the next floor up (former first floor) and it turns out that like the tunnel I just jump up the wall. So it seems like its either a bug, or its just a really badly implemented system, since there's now way to really know to do it until you get frustrated and start jumping around everywhere.
Enemy AI - A little less than OK. The enemies will hurl things at range sometimes, as they come running to you. Sometimes they run away...but I'm not sure why. Maybe to get at range after they just ran up to you? Anyway, they aren't like any of the other PK's and the enemies just run in straight lines at you with no pathfinding. It looks like there's an invisible wall over the edges, so they can't actually run off of the edge of things, but you can knock them off. But you'll still need to kill them.
Weapons - Well I can tell you that the stake gun is there, because its the first weapon after the Pain Killer that you get. It is useless for the types of enemies that you face though, except for the grenade launcher, which is almost useless, because its flak range is like 3 in-game feet.
Story - Seemed to be alright to start out with. Some random, I assume angel talks you through it. The story says that you are in Hell, it says that you are in Purgatory, and it doesn't seem to matter much because the level design, not the props or anything else, but the actual design specifically makes you aware of being in Hell, because its so bad.
Graphics - Basically looks like PainKiller Overdose to me. I have everything set up to the highest, and well, it looks like PK:OD.
This game overall seems like it was actually a modification of PK:OD that had really strong ideas, but sort of stopped being so developed half-way through and then rushed to put it together.
I'm sure the game has some redeeming qualities later on...well hopefully, but I didn't bother to find out. I don't think the guy that did the
Gamespot Review did either. I should have read it before I purchased the game.
Author
Topic: Painkiller Resurrection (Read 113 times)