Painkiller Overdose Reviews

９９％　Ｐａｉｎ　１％　Ｗｅａｐｏｎ

So many corrupted saves, so many

Tl;dr: I'm conflicted on this game. It's a good painkiller game with annoyances, tedium and crashes. Tastes like chicken. The original painkiller was a lot of fun with a few annoyances. This game is a lot of annoyances and a few pieces of fun. The story intro is pretty good, they present the character well, great VA making the protagonist feel like a strong revengful half demon. It plays and feels much like the original, with immersive and creative environments, creative and unique enemies, card challenges, souls and a new set of weapons that borrow a lot from the original weapons. But for some reason, all weapons feel less satisfying and they added tedium everywhere. I always run out of ammo. Always. Sometimes on most of the guns. This is good, because it forces me to utilize most of my guns. It's bad because I have to spend more time searching for ammo boxes that blend into the environment. I'm too often forced to mimic Judge Dredd when he was pinned down by the other judges in the 2012 movie. Hiding somewhere, then checking each weapon. Shotgun: empty, rockets: empty, minigun: empty, demon head: empty, arrows: empty, cluster bombs: empty, heart grenades: 13 left. Guess I'm using heart grenades then. Enemies have incredibly narrow/small hitboxes, easy to miss. I've seen shots go through their bodies without hitting, because the hitboxes are too small or poorly placed. I'm not an expert at aiming, but I'm not THAT bad at aiming. Spawn locations are really obvious in this game. The last game at least tried to give the illusion of enemies flowing in from somewhere else. This game, they mostly spawn in rapid succession in open space. Secret hunting is no fun. There are so many visually wide open spaces that are blocked off by invisible walls, that I mostly stopped even trying. The original had you climbing up broken lightpoles and jumping across tiny poles sticking out of a burning roof, i.e. places you'd never think to even look to get that holy item. It was hard to find an invisible wall. This game feels a lot more linear, because everything is blocked off with invisible walls, bar a few non-obvious exceptions. They still let you jump off ledges. Not all ledges, but most. The inconsistency makes it hard to know what to trust. Exploration is further hindered by areas that keep throwing an endless barrage of mortars, meteors or other damaging elements at you. You're not allowed to stay to look around. Move on, or die. Tentacles keep spawning behind you in tight spaces in the swamp level. Hitscanners keep hitting you from the first moment they spawn. Melee attacks don't hit when the animations shows a hit, but on the first frame the attack animation begins. I died too many times because I didn't understand what hit me, when it was the melee attacks being timed wrongly. Gas grenades are weird. If the grenade hits you, you take damage over time. The green cloud they emit? Not sure if that damages you, but the grenade object certainly does. I think they forgot to animate the scorpion enemy in the desert level. You know the desert level? The level with serious sam vibes, and the wolves/coyotes/whatever they are that howl. They howl constantly. It's probably a good audio atmospheric element, if they didn't play it on repeat nonstop without delay at semi-loud volume. I found a few softlocks on this level. Card challenge hunting is made harder in many ways. E.g. not all levels are backtrackable. The original game did an excellent job of making sure all levels are backtrackable (though I got lost on the military base). This game is hit or miss from map to map. I like that cards are more expensive, but dislike that the margin for error on challenges is unreasonably tight in some cases. One level wants you to gather 160 souls to get a card. There are 162 souls on the map, and most enemies fly off into the distance when shot because of physics. Even if you manage to gather the souls, the last fight is in a tight room. If you're in the center of the room at the last kill, you are ambushed by the end-level orb and robbed of the ability to gather those last few souls. Another level wants you to gather 400 gold. The level has 412 gold. Gold despawns. It's a nightmare to prevent 12 gold from despawning while also finding enough. Another level introduces a new gun, but also has a "only use the base weapon" card challenge. Can't use the new gun if you want the card. There was no reason for this card challenge on a level that introduces a new gun. Oh, and they changed the order of the guns. I keep rocketing myself because the rocket launcher is on '3' now. Also, rockets are really weak (except the ones that damage yourself, of course). Enemy pathing is sometimes really bad, they get stuck chasing directly towards you. I was sometimes jumping around looking for the way forwards.. but everything was locked. I had to check the gps arrow to find enemies stuck behind a railing. I got to the viking level, and then the game started crashing mid level. If there wasn't so much tedium and sources of annoyance, I'd keep playing. I do recommend it for its good parts. Just be mindful that the game might annoy you.