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Painkiller: Overdose
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Graphics & Sound:
Painkiller: Overdose is basically a community mod for the FPS game Painkiller. It's been 3 years since the original game came out, and the world has seen more complex shooters with story and atmosphere to boot. So is there any reason to pick up another flavor of this game?
You'll at least get a good visual experience with Painkiller: Overdose. Backgrounds are gritty and shadow-laden. Enemies are all variations on this game's hellish theme and look pretty good, but some seemed a bit cartoony. Killing enemies will result in an explosion of body parts sometimes, and a bit of blood splatter on your screen if you do the deed close-up. Everything runs smoothly, though there are occasional issues with the screen jittering when you get too close to a wall. Compare this to the original game, though, and I don't consider it an improvement. Painkiller seemed to create more of an atmosphere, and just looked better in my opinion.
Painkiller: Overdose has a great repertoire of satisfying explosions and sound effects. Background music is moody with a quick beat, but reminds me of a dozen other FPS games and doesn't seem to match the quality of Painkiller's score. With the non-stop action, you just aren't given a chance to sit back and listen to the music anyway. Regardless, nothing here is going to find its way into your music collection. Your character occasionally makes snarky comments like "kiss my half-angel butt," but honestly, I've heard funnier things from games that came years before this. And really, "butt?" This tormented, tortured soul was locked away for thousands of years and that's his venomous choice of words?
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Gameplay:
Painkiller: Overdose puts you in the shoes of Belial, a half-demon, half-angel who is a bit touchy after being stripped of his angelic wings and locked away for millennia. It seems Lucifer's death causes the locks on Belial's cage to break, and grants him his freedom. You go out and seek vengeance against those who did you wrong, and that's about the full extent of the story.
Like Painkiller, you're given a variety of weapons, each with a unique secondary firing mode. Honestly, I thought the original Painkiller weapons were more entertaining. In Overdose, you start off with a demon head that fires a laser beam at your enemies and has a secondary attack that looks like an electric-charged cloud that acts as an instant kill on some enemies. Staking your enemies up with the stake gun or using the "slicer" weapon in Painkiller was far more entertaining, and a much better attention-grabber for the first level. Many of the later weapons in Overdose just seem to be variations on the original weapons with a different look.
Though multiplayer is here, as it was in Painkiller, I wasn't able to find anyone to play with. Overall, the options seem to be the same: People Can Fly mode and Free-For-All are here as well as many different advanced options to tweak the match to your liking.
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Difficulty:
Painkiller: Overdose can be as difficult as you want, with a number of different difficulty levels to choose from. The easiest level of difficulty will take away your ability to use the Tarot feature, while the hardest will remove help like the free health that comes from your slain enemies. For a person who's really horrible at these types of games like me, the easiest difficulty still presented a challenge. There should be a difficulty setting to please everyone here, including FPS fiends.
For a self-imposed challenge, you can attempt to complete the level under certain restrictions. Doing so will unlock Tarot card bonuses, which you can use to give yourself extra advantages later on.
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Game Mechanics:
Painkiller: Overdose is your classic shoot first and think later FPS game. Hordes of demonic enemies come at you and all you need to think about is dodging and shooting. Checkpoints break up the action, and once you've cleared an area, you can search around for ammo and money before moving on.
That's about it: no puzzles to worry about, no tricks, just pure shooting action. Overdose doesn't seem to encourage playing around with the physics engine as much as Painkiller and seems to lack the overall creativity of its daddy. That's not to say it's bad, but it was a mod, and now you're being asked to play full price for it. It's not as if this is a brand new theme either: you're still fighting nasty, demonic enemies like you were in Painkiller.
There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new here, but if you liked Painkiller and other fast-paced shooters like it, you'll probably enjoy it. Even though this is a stand-alone game, the $40 price tag seems a bit hefty, so I'd recommend trying the demo before you buy it.
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-Fights with Fire, GameVortex Communications AKA Christin Deville |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 1.5 Ghz Intel Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon processor, 512 MB Ram, DVD-ROM 4X or higher, 2.5 GB Hard Disk space available, 128 MB DirectX 9 compatible Video Card (NVIDIA GEFORCE FX 5600, ATI RADEON 9600 or Better), DirectX 9 compatible sound card, Keyboard and Mouse |
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Test System:
Windows XP, 3.20 GigaHertz Intel Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, RADEON X850, Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS |
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