Painkiller review: Not even a buzz

Let’s not beat around the bush: rather than reviving the classic retro arena shooter, publisher 3D Realms and developer Anshar Studios have gone against the grain by making a horribly thin game that just doesn’t make much sense. The new Painkiller game revival isn’t just a disappointment on the surface, it was bitterly disappointing.

It’s not that I have a huge reverence for Painkiller. The original game is certainly impressive, but outside of this, it became a retread of the first game that just never reached the peak of quality. Painkiller’s reboot picks the pieces of its predecessor’s corpse and spins them out into a game that’s begging the player to keep going, but offers nothing to entice them back.

The Escapist recaps

• A reboot of the Painkiller series brings online co-op as a focus.
• The game lacks any of the fat and fluff that entice players to keep coming back.
• There are only nine main missions and a survival mode, none of which pack a punch.
• Painkiller has all the pieces needed to make a great solo game, but it’s this instead.

Painkiller 2025 is split into “Raids” and a survival mode called “Rogue Angel Mode”. Raids are the closest the game gets to a traditional campaign, but are structured across three biomes and nine missions. That’s three a piece, and on the default difficulty, solo, I managed to work through them in about three or four hours. 

Now, I don’t mind shooter campaigns that don’t outstay their welcome. For all its faults, the original Modern Warfare 2 is a compact, action-packed, and zero-fat campaign. Painkiller has zero fat, but it’s all gristle. 

A major problem with the game is that it insists on being this fairly mechanical experience. The original Painkiller is often dubbed a “boomer shooter“, just by association of it being close to the retro style of shooters. It’s more like Serious Sam, an arena-style shooter that gives you the tools to survive an onslaught of enemies. Lots of running backwards and quickly pivoting to try to grab the last drop of ammo to continue the murder spree. 

It masks all of the inner workings by simply not highlighting them. Larger enemies don’t have a health bar, and you’re unsure how long they’re going to keep pouring out of the walls. 

In my view, if a game’s core method of design is built around various arenas filled with waves, it might be best not to tell the player how many are left. Massive enemies that would be a thrilling challenge come off as a chore, as the red health bar ticks down. 

No reason to keep coming back to Painkiller in 2025

Games in this vein have evolved for good reason since Left 4 Dead brought them into the mainstream. The co-op shooter with set levels only works if there’s a twist. Left 4 Dead at least had its “AI Director”, which made each run feel different enough during the rudimentary days. Payday, or even Warhammer’s Vermintide, all found methods to keep the player running back through the game over and over again. 

If anything, Painkiller is in a position that Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak found itself in. It exists in a world that just doesn’t need it, and it offers barely anything new compared to the competition. It feels like a death march, more than a new launch. Crucially, it turns out that if there’s not a lot of fluff around the edges, there’s just not a lot of reason to keep going back to the well.

Everything is there, so what even happened?

This pains me greatly because I think that Anshar Studios has nailed how a modern Painkiller should play. The streams of enemies, combined with an even faster-paced style and some excellent weapons, are the fundamentals for building a solid solo experience. There’s the gun that shoots shurikens and lightning, and the stake gun that launches log-sized stakes like a sniper-shotgun. All of the pieces are there, but there is no structure to carry them.

Instead, it forces you through nine uninspiring missions with two others (bots or humans), all of which seem to be structured the same. It changes it up by swapping out what you’ll be carrying to a point, or if you’ll be standing on a point. 

You’ll fight waves of enemies, then you’ll be funnelled through some glorious looking levels, all to be ushered into a small arena or pathway to complete the one teamwork-based activity in each biome. Every single level is almost the same, and every single one of the sections that aren’t just rampaging demons is a struggle to enjoy, bots or not. 

After you’ve finished a level, it dumps you unceremoniously back into the lobby, where you can change characters (makes zero real difference), upgrade or change loadouts, and invest in game-altering tarot cards. These cards, in particular, require 3000 coins and burn up after one use, which, for the majority of my main run through the game, I just never really needed them. The effects never felt like they had much of a pervasive effect as pitched, and feel like the only real reason to treat the game’s missions as intended. 

Painkiller isn’t the game I wanted

The pieces of Painkiller that matter are there. Anshar Studios has managed to create an excellent controlling first-person shooter, but failed to create anything enticing around it. I have zero interest in running the levels again, and the survival mode can range from mediocre excursions to tedious boredom. I kept turning up rocks trying to find something good, but at every turn, the game is what it is, and it’s a completely bizarre decision to push this through by 3D Realms. 

Painkiller isn’t the game I wanted, nor is there a game in there that I want to play either. How did all these pieces not coalesce into something better than the sum of their parts? That’s right, you need to build an enjoyable experience underneath the mechanics and a dire nine-level campaign that offers the player nothing other than the option to replay them – which is something I won’t be doing anytime soon.

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