City on Water begins with you on the outskirts of the level, so look behind you to find the boxes of ammo needed to take on the enemies ahead of you. As you enter the city, look left to see your first targets - two careless goons standing on exploding barrels. Once you've fought your way across the Bridge of Sighs, finish off the undead bikers on the ledges of buildings and the red pentacle should appear.
Don't forget to collect the green souls of departed enemies as you progress, as of these turns you into an all-powerful demon able to slay anything in its path. Eventually, after much more killing, you'll find yourself outside a beautifully-detailed building decorated with ornate paintings, where hell literally breaks loose. Next, head on to a level with a fountain containing some very hard skull-headed beasts - obliterate everything and you'll finally reach the end of level by entering the spinning white pentacle.
Chapter 3 Level 5 involves you shooting Thor's giant hammer until it breaks he uses it to recharge his health and to bash the ground, causing you damage. You then blast him until he croaks - the red circle at the top of the screen shows how you're doing.
Hint: jump when he's about to bash his weapon on the ground. A bulky, out-of-shape demon from the depths of hell is struggling towards me carrying a fizzing barrel of gunpowder. I take aim and shoot the barrel, obliterating the unfortunate creature and sending a mixture of wood splinters, limbs and offal splattering around the walls of an underground cavern. It's hilarious. In fact, the noise of my guffaws is so loud that it interrupts the ZONE team, who rush over to take a look at what was so chucklesome.
I've said it once and I'll say it again - there's nothing wrong at all with violent videogames. In the messed-up shitstorm of a world we live in, taking a few virtual potshots at some pretend monsters on a computer screen is one of the least harmful things we can do.
Which is why I love Painkiller. This gloriously violent first-person shooter is a defiant, bloodstained two-fingered salute to those pious social commentators who continually condemn videogames as irresponsible entertainment. It's also a hugely entertaining, well-designed game that possesses some of the most beautiful looking levels I've ever seen - and yes, that includes Far Cry. Let's get down to business.
Painkiller is a no-nonsense run-and-gun blaster that takes its inspiration from classics like Doom , Quake and Duke Nukem , but with some hugely inventive weaponry, smart ragdoll physics and next-gen visuals. Developer People Can Fly is particularly proud of the fact that the game doesn't have a crouch button - like myself, it seems they don't like stealth much.
This is a major part of Painkiller's appeal - it knows that it's not Deus Ex , and it revels in that fact. You play the game as Daniel Garner, an every-dude who's recently died in a car crash along with his wife Catherine.
However, while your beloved has subsequently strapped on a pair of golden wings and begun banging out the latest Dido album on her celestial harp, you're stranded in Purgatory and must purify your soul before you can join her.
Luckily for us, this basically involves blasting the holy crap out of Satan and his army of devilish followers. Painkiller has four levels of difficulty and is crammed with 24 levels, made up of five chapters and always finishing with a big boss battle and we mean big. All in all, Painkiller will take most gamers at least ten hours to plough through on an easier level, and that's without taking time to discover secret areas, collect all the holy items and gold coins, and admire the gorgeous scenery whizzing past at a liquid 60fps.
Gameplay is simple. Just aim your weapon at anything that roars, bellows or cackles, shoot them back to Hades, and progress to the next part of the level. Level transitions are signified by a checkpoint in the shape of a fiery red pentacle. Walk over it and a few doors will usually seal shut and the next wave of monsters will begin piling towards you, bent on reducing your already-dead body into purgatory pate.
Additional interest is provided by special Tarot cards and power-ups. Silver temporary and gold permanent Tarot cards are awarded for completing specific actions during a level. Before starting a level, you can arrange your cards on a Black Tarot board, and as long as you've collected enough gold coins from blasting open coffins, urns and barrels, you can use them to aid your battles during a level. Souls, meanwhile, are the green floating detritus of defeated foes that when collected, add one to your health.
However, once you've accumulated 66 of them, they transform you into a powerful demon that sees everything in black and white, with enemies shown as shimmering orange entities. Rather like the Berserk mode from Dooms of yore, you can then storm around tearing apart every one of the hellish servants in your path with a deft tap of the mouse.
Painkiller's level design isn't particularly special, with much wandering about and re-tracing of steps, but there's just enough variety to surprise you and keep things from getting monotonous. This includes the later addition of bounce pads, a series of Indiana Jones-style crushing ceilings, as well as a fair few nasty traps that we'll allow you to discover on your own - and get royally shafted, just like we did.
It has to be said though, the architecture and backgrounds are awe-inspiring. Each one of the 24 levels has completely different styles and textures. List a few bullet points about advanced physics and polygon counts.
See the blandly handsome hero's sneering unshaven mug featured on the box cover as if it were an ad for Gillette's new four-bladed razor. Let your eyes glaze over But when you actually play the game, you'll realize everything you know about the gaming industry can be wrong.
Wait, wait. Let's back up. At the most superficial level, Painkiller is simply an old-school shooter. It's you against an army of demons, one of the oldest stories in the book: they've got the numbers, and you've got the firepower.
There's nary a sign of anything resembling a puzzle with the exception of a few bosses and you'll never have to wander because there's an arrow at the top of the screen pointing the way. It's a shooter in the purest and most unadulterated sense of the word. But this only begins to describe Painkiller. Perhaps what's most amazing is that it plays like the work of a seasoned developer with a rare grasp on atmosphere and tone, a rock-solid set of technologies, and sophisticated ideas about game design.
Don't be fooled by the mercifully minimal pretensions towards storytelling. The story is very basic, allowing the narrative to focus on action set pieces in which you're the star, a prime mover with a big gun. Painkiller is a desultory journey through an infernal limbo, both picaresque and picturesque, moving dreamlike from an opera house to a suspension bridge to a military base, for no good reason other than the fact that they make for cool levels.
One cathedral has minarets, another has flying buttresses, and yet another has some sort of funky Babylonian ziggurat vibe. There are demon ninjas, robed monks, and drunken sailors belching poisonous vapors. A ghost soars through the walls of an insane asylum, zombies in gas masks guard a UFO, and skull-headed bikers loiter among Venetian canals. It's as disjointed as it sounds, but the sheer randomness is covered in a consistently creepy and unsettling tone that hasn't been done this well since Monolith's first Blood.
In ways, it resembles Serious Sam, but without the bright colors and breezy gameplay. Serious Sam was Looney Tunes. Painkiller is Lovecraft. Part of what makes Painkiller work so well is how it keeps unveiling little surprises, carefully doling them out over the course of the game.
By way of a small example, there's a level near the end with crows flying around. When you kill someone, the crows descend on the corpse and start picking at it. It's a simple trick that makes great use of the ragdoll physics, but like everything else in Painkiller's bag of tricks, it's carefully placed.
People Can Fly keeps this going from the simple graveyard opening all the way to a mind-bending timeless finale, which is set in one of the most memorable levels you'll ever see in a first-person shooter.
Painkiller: Resurrection is one of the best horror shooters Vote 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Requirements and additional information:. The demo contains the introduction, the tutorial and the first level Cathedral. Antony Peel. Software languages. Author Homegrown Games. Updated Over a year ago.
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