Painkiller: Overdose is aptly named; it's an overdose of Painkiller. My advice to those who have not played the original Painkiller is to skip this game and get Painkiller, which is only 9.99 on Steam. My advice to those who have played the original Painkiller is to skip this game and play Painkiller again.

There is little plot here: in Overdose, you are Belial, the bastard child of an angel and devil. This storyline is introduced with a cheesy and minutes long monologue about how angry Belial is, mixed with the images of five turned-through book pages. I got a bad feeling followed by something so bad I can't tell you what it is until the end of the review. You have been trapped for thousands of years in prison. When Daniel beat Lucifer in the original Painkiller, the resources necessary to keep you in prison are weakened, and you manage to escape. You then kill other demons. Once you are done killing demons you are fighting…ninjas. Later, you kill scorpions and mummies in a desert. Like everything else about this game, the varied settings and enemies make little sense.

The actual game follows the original Painkiller's formula: the weapons sport new skins but function exactly the same, the levels follow a checkpoint system in which your health is fully restored at the beginning of each save, and there are waves of mostly melee-based attackers. You can gain tarot cards by completing objectives unique to each level, and levels can be replayed for this purpose. The game boasts "over 40 enemy types" but there are really only four: weak melee, strong melee, ranged, and really huge guys that are stunned every time you hit them (they are divided into melee and ranged, but they attack so rarely they don't get to have two categories). While playing, I thought "this is like a weaker and cheap version of Painkiller. A bunch of modders could've made something like this and you'd expect to get it for free." Surprise, surprise--I later read that it simply was a mod of Painkiller that received funding. You can tell, because this game could have been made 3 years ago (Pentium III required!) and still costs forty bucks.

Overdoses' offenses so far are many: unoriginal weapons, predictable and highly repetitive action, watery graphics and annoying, random phrases muttered by Belial. These are somewhat forgivable-it's a sequel to an old-school style of mindless FPS, and the game didn't pretend to be anything else, after all. The part that happens right after the monologue, however, is as unforgivable as the sins that led to Belial's literal and figurative creation: a load time that is longer than one minute. It's not because of my computer, either; other users experience this. So Overdose is a fast-paced game in which you will frequently die (even the second-lowest setting is somewhat challenging), but every time you die you must wait over a minute, no matter what hardware your computer has.

Without the bad load time, Overdose might have been tolerable, but that flaw seals its awfulness. There isn't enough time in the world for anyone to put this 8-hour game even at the bottom of his list, even if he loves first-person shooters.

Dec 11, 2007 | 0 comments
Michael Walbridge