Holy Hell, Painkiller is awesome!
Thanks to my new favorite game reviewer Yahtzee, who does Zero Punctuation at The Escapist, I've found the game that Doom 3 should have been. It's called Painkiller, and it's freaking awesome.
I was seriously disappointed by Doom 3. So disappointed, in fact, I quit during the first real level. First, you have to go through a long, boring Half-Life-esque "walk around and talk to people" sequence, but without the interesting stuff that made the Half-Life ones tolerable. Next, I'm battling my way through super-dark grey rooms, killing the occasional zombie-guy, when I get shot in the back. I KNOW I cleared that room, where'd he come from? I load a saved game, and go through again, facing backwards, only to find that a guy popped into existence out of thin air and shot me instantly. He didn't teleport in, he just appeared, and shot me before I could possibly react. When the game starts cheating on the first level, it's a very bad sign. I gave up after the shotgun proved to be roughly as effective as the flashlight as a weapon, because it scattered so much and did so little damage, I was better off beating the first imp to death with my light, which shouldn't be a separate weapon anyway.
Anyway, Painkiller's about a guy who dies and goes to Purgatory. He cuts a deal with the angels to kill a bunch of demons for them, and then runs around killing demons and zombies and witches with the coolest arsenal ever.
All the weapons have two fire modes. In his review--which is worth watching even if you don't play video games--Yahtzee repeatedly notes that one of the weapons shoots shurikens and lightning. This is undeniably cool, but frankly, the stake gun is the coolest single weapon ever, possibly excepting the gravity gun from HL2. It either rips enemies apart in a shower of gore and limbs, or, more often, it pins them to the nearest surface with a 5-foot long, arm-thick sharpened tree. There's few things more satisfying in a game than nailing a zombie to a wall with a stake through his head--and one of those few things is nailing a zombie to the ground with a stake through the crotch. The Painkiller itself is a pretty cool weapon. It's either spinning death blade for close-in fighting, or you can fire the blade off. If it hits an enemy, it kills them and pulls the corpse toward you as it returns. If it hits a wall, it sticks, and by aiming at the stuck blade, you can create a tripwire of energy to toast baddies.
One thing that Painkiller does that no other first-person shooter has ever done is allow the player to choose his targeting reticle. You can pick from dozens of designs, then customize the color and opacity. This is a small thing, yes, but it's also a very small thing as far as programming goes. Reticles require NO programming. You can make them in MS-Paint. I remember in the first Tribes game, people made custom reticles, which you could use by overwriting the .jpg image of a reticle in the Tribes folder. I even tried making a rangefinding reticle for the mortar, but never finished it because Tribes 2 came out or something. I can't count the number of times I've lost sight of my reticle in FPS games because the background was the same shade of orange/white/red/whatever as the reticle, or how many times I've missed because the reticle for the weapon I was using was five tiny dots in a crosshair shape and I was looking at the wrong dot--or because the reticle was a thick pair of crossed bars and my target was totally obscured by the thing I was trying to use to aim at it.. Painkiller eliminates these issues with a very simple little customization.
Bottom line--get Painkiller. It's a bargain-bin game, and Best Buy has a version of it for $10. That version is only half the game, 12 levels, with no cinematics or backstory, but it's totally worth it. There's an expansion and a sequel, too, so once you get hooked, there'll be more to play.
I was seriously disappointed by Doom 3. So disappointed, in fact, I quit during the first real level. First, you have to go through a long, boring Half-Life-esque "walk around and talk to people" sequence, but without the interesting stuff that made the Half-Life ones tolerable. Next, I'm battling my way through super-dark grey rooms, killing the occasional zombie-guy, when I get shot in the back. I KNOW I cleared that room, where'd he come from? I load a saved game, and go through again, facing backwards, only to find that a guy popped into existence out of thin air and shot me instantly. He didn't teleport in, he just appeared, and shot me before I could possibly react. When the game starts cheating on the first level, it's a very bad sign. I gave up after the shotgun proved to be roughly as effective as the flashlight as a weapon, because it scattered so much and did so little damage, I was better off beating the first imp to death with my light, which shouldn't be a separate weapon anyway.
Anyway, Painkiller's about a guy who dies and goes to Purgatory. He cuts a deal with the angels to kill a bunch of demons for them, and then runs around killing demons and zombies and witches with the coolest arsenal ever.
All the weapons have two fire modes. In his review--which is worth watching even if you don't play video games--Yahtzee repeatedly notes that one of the weapons shoots shurikens and lightning. This is undeniably cool, but frankly, the stake gun is the coolest single weapon ever, possibly excepting the gravity gun from HL2. It either rips enemies apart in a shower of gore and limbs, or, more often, it pins them to the nearest surface with a 5-foot long, arm-thick sharpened tree. There's few things more satisfying in a game than nailing a zombie to a wall with a stake through his head--and one of those few things is nailing a zombie to the ground with a stake through the crotch. The Painkiller itself is a pretty cool weapon. It's either spinning death blade for close-in fighting, or you can fire the blade off. If it hits an enemy, it kills them and pulls the corpse toward you as it returns. If it hits a wall, it sticks, and by aiming at the stuck blade, you can create a tripwire of energy to toast baddies.
One thing that Painkiller does that no other first-person shooter has ever done is allow the player to choose his targeting reticle. You can pick from dozens of designs, then customize the color and opacity. This is a small thing, yes, but it's also a very small thing as far as programming goes. Reticles require NO programming. You can make them in MS-Paint. I remember in the first Tribes game, people made custom reticles, which you could use by overwriting the .jpg image of a reticle in the Tribes folder. I even tried making a rangefinding reticle for the mortar, but never finished it because Tribes 2 came out or something. I can't count the number of times I've lost sight of my reticle in FPS games because the background was the same shade of orange/white/red/whatever as the reticle, or how many times I've missed because the reticle for the weapon I was using was five tiny dots in a crosshair shape and I was looking at the wrong dot--or because the reticle was a thick pair of crossed bars and my target was totally obscured by the thing I was trying to use to aim at it.. Painkiller eliminates these issues with a very simple little customization.
Bottom line--get Painkiller. It's a bargain-bin game, and Best Buy has a version of it for $10. That version is only half the game, 12 levels, with no cinematics or backstory, but it's totally worth it. There's an expansion and a sequel, too, so once you get hooked, there'll be more to play.