Painkiller: Battle out of Hell Review

Expansion packs are unique in the sense that they aren’t full games, rather just add-ons to a game to improve the original game. Consider expansion packs half a real game at a discounted price. For 150% of a game, you pay the price of 1 1/2 games. So far, I have found few expansion packs worthy of purchasing at all. The few that do include Starcraft: Brood War, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots. In the beginning of 2004, there was a very interesting FPS by the name of Painkiller. Now DreamCatcher Games released an expansion pack. The amount of time between the release of the original and expansion pack is much shorter than the average, but it doesn’t stop this game from being any less worth it.

First off, this expansion is basically a couple more levels, guns, and multiplayer modes. Don’t expect a real improvement on story, especially when you consider that the original game had a huge lack of story. However, the game’s shadow of a story goes like this: David Garner (the protagonist of the story) defeated Lucifer in the original game. Now he has to defeat the blood thirsty villain Alastor.

Like the original, this game focuses on run and gun action. However, note that there are some big differences in difficulty. I found this game much harder than the original. So if you only played on the easy difficulties of the original and cannot play on the harder difficulties, I suggest you train before you play. The bosses in this game are somewhat annoying, much more annoying when compared to the previous game. There are also cheap deaths, which is not a good thing.

The game’s graphics are also improved. Nearly all the enemies have very interesting destruction sequences when you hit them with a painkiller weapon. The landscapes are also beautifully detailed. The audio remains just as good as the previous game.

If the gameplay annoyances don’t get to you, then you can easily get an extra 15 hours of gameplay. A huge problem I had with this game was its bugs. There were a plethora of bugs that I encountered, one of the worst being that memory bug. It constantly said that I was low on memory and forced me to restart the game. A little more time checking and I am sure that this game would have been bug free.

Overall, Painkiller: Battle out of Hell improves the original game by simply giving you more interesting run and gun action, but its gameplay isn’t better than the original. The game is weighed down too much by annoyances such as cheap deaths and bugs. However, I still suggest a purchase if you are a fan of the original Painkiller game at a reduced price. It may not be a Brood War or Opposing Force, but it is still plenty o’ fun.