I’m not much of a retro gamer. Generally speaking I’m too busy with new or imminent releases to spend time with the games of yesteryear, and if I’m not then there’s usually a live service grindathon or two to keep me occupied. But I have played a lot of games. Like, a lot. And arguably there aren’t many classics I didn’t play at some point in my lifetime. So when a game like the Painkiller Remake is announced I’ll usually be excited based on my memories of the original, even if they are a couple of decades old.
Sadly, though, after spending some time with Anshar’s remake, I’m kind of hankering to just play the original, warts and all. I should probably start by clarifying that this is very much Painkiller in name only. Protagonist Daniel, he of the chiselled jaw and incredible hair, is nowhere to be seen, replaced by four protagonists with names like Ink, Void, and Sol. I don’t want to come across as needlessly negative, but there’s very little about the character designs or writing that piques my interest, instead this is more a change to facilitate co-op play should you prefer.
The Painkiller Remake is, to all intents and purposes, a Vermintide-style co-op shooter that sees you mowing through hordes of zombies and demons as you attempt to navigate the depths of a very Doom-esque Hell. You can heal yourself and one another, call out enemies, and will need to stick together and free fallen comrades from specific rooms to bring them back.
While it is quite fun to mash demons into pulp, there’s a lot of work to be done yet under the hood. Right now enemies just kind of pop into existence and vanish when you kill them, ignoring basic things like where the ground is, and it means there’s very little immersion to be had. Taken at face value it’s a fairly evocative aesthetic, with some interesting uses of light and colour to conjure the necessary visuals. The atmosphere is fairly flat, though, with huge gothic arenas bedecked with skulls and candles but little in the way of environmental storytelling or flavour. It’s a fairly obvious depiction of Hell, but I guess it worked well enough for Metal: Hellsinger.
Player characters communicate almost entirely in quips and determined vows to get out of here, but there’s no real personality to any of it. You drop into a mission, mow through hordes of enemies, maybe activate a lever here and there by punching it, and collect gold to upgrade weapons between runs. The upgrade system is quite cool, though, as you can apply different effects to each weapon that changes how they fire or what they do, and there are multiple options to choose from. Each gun has its own tree, with effects like “Bounce”, “Ricochet”, and “Deadeye”. You’re rewarded for being creative with kills, as each one adds to your score multiplier, though I admit I didn’t even attempt to keep up or fully decipher what most of them meant. “Dunked on” could have referred to multiple things, but it always massages the hindbrain to see numbers go up and accolades tumble onto the screen.
When a gun won’t get the job done, the click of the left stick will pull out the Painkiller itself. This device is a contraption of whirring blades that mashes enemies into bits, but again it lacks any sort of impact or catharsis. There are no animated glory kills or badass special abilities, which leaves the action feeling a little one-note. When larger enemies storm the group, I just resorted to back-peddling frantically until they inevitably separated me from the AI bots and killed me.
Perhaps the most interesting element is the Tarot Card system, that allows you to unlock various buffs and abilities to equip on your character. In the preview build I didn’t see anything too far-out. They were mainly for things like increasing health, energy regeneration, or weapon damage, but they hint at more complex and interesting things to come.
For fans of this genre in particular, there is promise, and Anshar Studios certainly has a few months to tighten things up, but right now it’s hard to be excited for something that wears the Painkiller name but doesn’t quite do enough with its legacy. With recent titles like the ongoing World War Z and even Space Marine 2 hitting the same notes but with far more panache and personality, the Painkiller Remake really needs to hit the ground running to compete. As Saber Interactive owns publisher 3D Realms, I can only hope the Painkiller Remake benefits from some influence.
Painkiller is set for release on October 9th.
