Doom Meets Destiny

What if you mixed Doom’s combat with the level-based structure of Remnant or the strike and raid structure of Destiny? Well, Anshar Studios and Saber have, and that has served as a foundation for the new entry/reboot of the Painkiller franchise, releasing later this year. After going hands-on with an early build of the game, I am impressed by how well those two halves of other franchises and series blend together to create an enjoyable co-op shooter, with a decent amount of progression to boot.

But, I do have some concerns about the repetitiveness of the experience’s core gameplay and some key pieces of the gameplay puzzle that the game seems to be missing to stop Painkiller from feeling monotonous.

View Full-size

Painkiller feels unmistakably inspired by the recent Doom games.

Run and Gun

Painkiller appears to have very little connection to the original games and is more of a reimagining of the series, with you moving through demon-infested purgatory, completing objectives, and earning currency to upgrade your weapons and buy buffs in the game’s hub. The gameplay feels a lot like the modern Doom games, especially Doom Eternal, with a high degree of mobility, grapple points, light parkour, and a combat framework that is ripped right out of those games but in co-op with friends or bots if you want to play solo.

You have two weapons you can choose from to use in a level, with six in total, and the classic Painkiller weapon, which is a spinning blade you can use to charge into enemies. Using the Painkiller weapon on enemies will cause ammo for your weapons to drop, and performing finishers with it will reward you with energy to use for each main weapon’s alternate fire. You can jump to platforms with the Painkiller and even perform flashy finishers on mini-bosses with it.

But the game isn’t entirely like Doom Eternal, as the gameplay is far more mindless. Instead of each fight feeling like a puzzle, every encounter and arena feels more like a place where you just run around and hold the trigger down. Weapons don’t have any reloads, so you can just hold the trigger down indefinitely for automatic weapons or fire 60 bullets back-to-back with a handgun if you want.

Most enemies die in a few shots, except for the mini-boss enemies, which can be weakened with your alternate fire. Weapons can be upgraded to make this gameplay even more one-note with ricocheting bullets, improved area-of-effect attacks with alternate fire, and more.

View Full-size

Weapons get even more deadly with alternate fire modes that can deal more damage than the regular fire.

Despite the mindlessness of it, I had a bunch of fun with Painkiller and thoroughly enjoyed how tight and polished the combat felt. It’s on par with the best games in the genre and proves once again that Saber is an incredibly talented developer that can just about do anything. The flow was also fantastic as moving from area to area during each level or “raid” came with objectives, traversal, great vistas, and gorgeous environments. The environments here are fantastic, and they have their purgatory style and aura that help separate it from Doom’s hellscapes.

But What Else Is There?

The structure of the game works well and combining this kind of fast-paced shooter with the strike/raid formula of Destiny or the level formula of Remnant feels like an ingenious marriage of ideas. However, I have worries about the repetitiveness of Painkiller over the course of the full game. While a major boss was teased in my build, beyond the combat, all I saw was the same objective reused several times across both levels I had access to, which involved killing a bunch of demons to fill up a blood tank that was then used to open a door.

There really wasn’t much else beyond kill stuff, fill this blood tank, and repeat. Again, while I had fun, it felt like I was already seeing a major crack in the game’s foundations.

View Full-size

While levels look gorgeous and inspired, objectives within them are fairly by-the-numbers.

The game also feels like it is lacking that third piece of the puzzle. While the combat foundation is great, and the progression seems sizeable (more on that shortly), the moment-to-moment gameplay lacks the brain-teasing puzzles or enticing secrets you can find in the other games I have already mentioned in this preview.

While there is a character/class system, these are just pre-defined individuals that change your gameplay in a minor way (slightly more damage, more alternate fire energy, etc.).

Painkiller does have several difficulties you can set for each level, with the game geared towards the higher end of the difficulty scale. But, beyond enemies that deal more damage and fewer resources, I didn’t see much that changed gameplay or objective-wise.

This area of Painkiller feels like its big weakness, and I hope there is a lot more to this side of the game in the full release.

Gather, Spend, Upgrade

As you kill demons and explore levels, you will pick up gold that can be spent on weapon upgrades in the hub between raids. Each weapon effectively has its own skill tree. These skills provide dramatic upgrades to each weapon, such as giving the hand cannon flaming bullets or the machine gun an alternate fire electricity ball that can be fired out to stun enemies.

Each of the six weapons has around a dozen of these skills, and there is a lot of flexibility in playstyles, allowing you to choose weapons you like, from shotguns to precise spear-impaler guns and rocket launchers.

View Full-size

The weapon upgrade trees are surprisingly deep and impactful on the entire experience. Small stat buffs and damage increases aren’t present here.

You can also use this currency to roll a random Tarot Card in a lottery. These can be equipped before a raid to change the rewards you get and your damage or stats. Some examples include boosting the amount of gold you receive at the end of a raid or increasing your damage. As you roll these cards, you unlock them in a deck, and once used, they disappear. However, you can spend cores, which you unlock by completing objectives in raids, to reuse any Tarot Card in your deck, which is a feature I appreciated. It means you can either spend the cores to get your favorite card in your next raid or roll the lottery to try and get that card for gold instead of the rarer cores.

There were at least a few dozen of these in the menu during the preview, and I hope this is where a lot of the variety in the game’s objectives and maps comes from.

As someone who has played A LOT of shooters, I was impressed by how robust Painkiller felt as a product. The combat here stands up alongside the best in the genre and there is a great flow and feel to shooting enemies constantly, even though it is a bit mindless here. My hope is that the progression and customization systems in the weapon upgrades and Tarot Cards provide the variety needed to help shake up the levels and gameplay a bit more.

Either way, Painkiller is shaping up to be a pretty great shooter, especially for its AA price, that I hope gets its time in the spotlight later this year.