Painkiller Black Edition: every 66 souls, you become one of the monsters you hunt

Repackaged with the Battle Out of Hell expansion, People Can Fly's shooter splits players between those who want nothing but gunfire and those who tire of the same locked room.

Two guns in one, caught between Heaven and Hell

You're trapped between Heaven and Hell, awaiting judgment, while the entire afterlife gears up for a war without truce and you're just one more pawn caught in the middle of it. Painkiller Black Edition tells that story while slowly unveiling the lies behind the hero's fall — and it hides an odd trigger halfway through the campaign: every 66 souls you collect, you turn into one of the possessed creatures you were hunting.

Each of the game's 14 weapons is really two: a primary fire and a secondary one, from the stake that pins enemies to a wall, the floor or the ceiling, to the Painkiller itself that gives the title its name. Underneath runs the Havok 2.0 physics engine, which drives the bodies that react to every hit and the environments that buckle as the mayhem wears on; the studio's own graphics engine, dubbed the PAIN Engine, layers on soft shadows, water reflections and volumetric fog — lavish by the standards of the time.

The bundle brings together the original game and the Battle Out of Hell expansion, which adds 10 new single-player stages and a fresh batch of villains — part of a total of more than 30 levels, all packed with enemies by the dozen and gigantic bosses. Those who played it also keep track of the running time: the main campaign runs past 12 hours, and the expansion tacks on another 8, straight from the accounts of players who finished both. The studio behind it is People Can Fly, with Prime Matter handling distribution; this edition arrived on the GOG store on December 19, 2014.

Mods of this game on Clairo

• Painkiller RTX

Each of them requires this game, according to the store itself.

A question nobody settles: closer to Quake or to Doom?

Comparing Painkiller to another game is almost a pastime among the people who have written about it. In a review from February 2009, the writer breaks with the consensus and argues that the true heir isn't Doom but Quake — pointing to Heretic as the closest relative to what most people remember. The debate never closes, and maybe that's the whole point: the game borrows a little from each without copying any of them outright.

The praise that comes up most often is for the arsenal. You can wield the title weapon as a saw up close or, on its alternate mode, fire a harpoon trailing a beam of energy, pinning an enemy in the air and burning it from afar — all on the same trigger. A review from March 2009 devotes its entire length to the stake gun: the same stake that nails bodies to a wall catches fire if driven home at the end of an arc, and turns into a trap when crossed with the grenade of the secondary mode. It's that kind of combination, those reviews say, that carries the game even without a deep plot.

Others prize what's missing: no escort mission, no timed sequence, no filler between one firefight and the next. A review from July 2011 adds the settings to that — from an abandoned shipyard to the flattened streets of Stalingrad — and how the soundtrack helps sell each of them. The rhythm they praise is always the same: seal the room, kill everything, move on. It's the very same formula that, for another set of players, becomes the problem — and that's what the next section is about.

The same locked room, seen from another angle

The most repeated complaint takes aim squarely at the rhythm the fans celebrate. In a review from September 2009, posted on the game's own page on GOG, where it is sold, the writer describes the cycle as walking into a room, watching the doors lock, cutting down the whole wave of teleported creatures and only then pressing on; he recounts having tried to enjoy the game, hoping it really would be like Doom, and only after a while realizing that the repetition was winning out over his initial enthusiasm.

One writer, in August 2012, says he gave up after just 3 stages. By that point in the game, only 2 weapons had shown up — including the genre's most obvious shotgun. Another account, from August 2011, sums up the problem as structural: locked room, wave of teleported monsters, a frantic run-and-gun through the quiet, ammo and health pickups, next room — always the same sequence, with no end to it.

The most recent grievance, posted in August 2020, shifts targets: it aims at the bosses, charged with unwarned fall damage at every transition — one of them, they say, can only be beaten if you know in advance where to land. Between the oldest review on this list and that one, the year changed; the complaint did not: the structure still demands patience with its own mechanics before it will hand over any reward.

For players who just want to shoot, not those after a surprise

Painkiller Black Edition is for the player who wants to boot the game up, walk into a room and leave it with nothing left standing — no stopping to untangle a plot, no escort to protect, no timer running against the clock. It's the crowd the comparison with Doom, Quake and Serious Sam already describes on its own: people who would trade mystery for a well-aimed round against a wall of monsters.

Anyone looking for varied objectives, difficulty tuned from boss to boss or a story that holds interest on its own will run into the same complaint voiced on the side that didn't like it: the room locks, the monsters arrive in waves, and after a few stages the trick always turns out to be the same one. The very door lock that thrills one side of the review list wearies the other — the difference between the two camps isn't the game, it's how long each can stand to repeat their own favorite move. The Battle Out of Hell expansion stretches that experience for those who have already decided they like the formula; it isn't what will win over anyone still on the fence.