This is not a Painkiller game

[F2dk]

I have been a Painkiller fan since the original game was released. Although BooH and Overdose weren't on par with the original game, they still were great entertainment.

I will try to explain why I loved Painkiller (singleplayer), and what made it so special:
- Each level had a theme, giving it a unique look and experience. Who doesn't remember City On Water, Swamp, Opera House, Castle or Hell!
- The game was very polished. If you played the game with normal curiosity you wouldn't experience any bugs.
- You walk from area to area, getting locked in, kill a lot of enemies, and then you get a small pause where you can explore the area, find ammo and health, or search for secret places.
- The level design was very structured. The maps were divided into several small "arenas" with an appropriate amount of ammo, health and enemies.
- Within the level each arena was different, yielding an exciting, varied game play.
- The secret places were actually hidden areas in the level. Often you could see the secret (if you were attentive) and the challenge was to find out how to navigate to the secret.

Now that I have bought and played Painkiller: Resurrection, I just have to say I am extremely disappointed. I had hoped to see more of the features described above, with some new weapons, monsters, maps and a coop multiplayer. But I didn't get that at all, and that's why I'm saying "this is not a painkiller game".

Instead I got the following (compare each point to the points mentioned above):
- All levels more or less use the same textures (except level 1) and are dark and dull. They don't have a theme that makes each level look outstanding (except level 1 perhaps).
- There are so many bugs in this game that a lot of people have speculated that an alpha version of the game was released by mistake. We are talking about visual artifacts, missing textures, crashes, missing features, etc.
- In most levels you are placed in a huuuge level with a lot of monsters. To me it looks like the mappers have just made a big map (not caring much about detail) and scattered a humongous amount of monsters all over the level. There is no structure at all. Just one big surface with monsters all over the place. This is FAR FROM what how the original Painkiller was.
- This also means that you can never take a deep breath and begin to look for secrets because while you do, monsters may spawn in random places just around you.

All in all, this game is nothing like Painkiller and should not be called Painkiller just because it uses the same graphics engine, weapons and models.

I would like to be a little more concrete. Because it is my impression from the developers' responses on this forum that they actually think their game is good and it doesn't have any significant bugs or lacking any expected features. And since it is not very difficult to prove them wrong I have decided to do it. I guess people that are considering buying the game can also take a look at this before making their final decision.

As I already mentioned, this game doesn't work at all like the good old Painkiller games we loved did. You can run through Level 2 in 4 minutes and Level 3 in 5 minutes virtually without killing anyone.

Video: 4min Run-through of Level 2
Video: 5min Run-through of Level 3

To me this is unacceptable in a Painkiller game.

There are also a lot of visual bugs and map bugs.

[Bug1] Here is a door that disappears at certains distances
[Bug2] Here my weapon and the whole world disappears
[Bug3] A continuation of Bug2
[Bug4] You can get behind walls ("outside" the level)
[Bug5] In Level3 there is a particle bug (reported by many people)
[Bug6] In some places you can actually get inside walls
[Bug7] Even though I have Clip Distance at maximum, the levels are designed in such a way that it causes some annoying artifacts.
[Bug8] You can actually jump outside the world

Last but not least, the navigational AI is terrible.
IvanErtlov wrote:

As long as there are flaws, we`ll fix them. But that the AI won`t win a nobel prize was stated long ago and that`s the way it is also in previous isntallements of the series.

This is not true. The navigational AI wasn't great in the former games but it was much much better than the one in Resurrection (this is actually quite interesting, I would love to know the reason behind this).

Video: Resurrection AI compared to Painkiller AI

Now I have tried to explain more precisely why I am disappointed of Resurrection. I would like to hear the developers' response to the points made above and to the bugs.

Just to make the picture complete, other bugs include:
- Missing textures (example)
- Missing battle sound (sometimes it just goes silent)
- Monsters dying by themselves (as seen in the run-throughs above)
- Multiplayer crashes
- No real Coop mode

Thanks for reading.

[Kneitinger]

Well done and very thorough!

Thanks for all of the effort!

[X-uZ]

well done and nice effort. hopefully it will result in a better game for us all

[malcolmx]

this game isn't really a ``skilled`` Fan based Modder's game either, because an experienced modder would've added more buildings/ more themes etc and done a far better job; less bugs too

this looks like it's been thrown together in a hurry, by a lower grade modder; the sort of thing i'd do, an amateur

because i've had quite a few DOOM 3 mods and PK mods too and they're bar better than this, especially the DOOM Mods; some of them are almost as detailed as the main game and very large too, now if a skilled Modder can do all of this for free, think what he would do if you paid him.

EASY......now this new game might require the original game too, because the huge DOOM 3 mods do as well, well what, we're all fans and thus we all have the first game

[lightstar]

Actually I did not finish the game yet but I will not play it until the developers release an update for it because the bugs are so many like the game still in the alpha stage not in even beta version and also I'm stuck in stupid level 2 at the beginning of the level like the game change to noclip mode and the player falls down beyond the 3-D boundary and after few second he died I tried to restart the game but this was not solve the problem finally I deleted the savegame and played the game again from the beginning and this time I played this level but after finishing the level the game did not transfer me to the choosing levels menu (The Star) but directly start the second level also in this level are so many untextured areas and the player can get out the playing world and that in many places in that level. Also the devlopers said about a big area to explore actually this turned the game to become very boring.... same environment and not that much change in the world of the level in addition with the horrible unbalance AI (kill 600 in each level) if you think this turn the game to too much fan it made it very very boring.

[PKRed]

I definitely agree about running through the game, and then the monsters die, that means people can rush through the game if they want even on trauma. In pk 1 it was part of the game to kill all the monsters, only on a few levels like the airport that searching for the monsters and there was optional exploration.
Heres the difference in resurrection, checkpoints only show up if you try to kill as many monsters as you can. So if you rush through the game, and die, you start at the last checkpoint so there is reason to kill the monsters.

I think this game is similar in that it has loads of secrets and jumping puzzles, and pk 1 did have a few open ended levels. In pk 1 you didn't get to explore the level till the end portal showed up and had to back track because doors shut you out. In pkr you can go just about anywhere you can because there are no doors to shut you out. So once you kill the monsters, you can go back and explore with out problems.

I don't mind the monsters spawning while exploring for secrets, means staying alert.

I thought that about the levels as well that they all look the same except the first one. I would also like to see more outlandish levels, like the village, opera house, asylum, orphanage and looney park. PKR looked very much the same. I thought purgatory was supposed to be dark, gray, rainly, that is what this game is, but yes I would like to see variety as well.

The checkpoint to checkpoint, room by room, makes the game "safe" so you know there won't be any attacks on you.
I would like to see a combination of checkpoint to checkpoint, and the open ended versions like in pkr, much like the haunted city.


The steam update fixed a lot of the problems, so if you have not played the game after the steam update, might want to try again, the gloomy mountains are fixed and the bridge is the same as the catacombs, or better from pk 1.

I had 5 or 6 crashes after the steam update, but that was after loads of reloads after dying.
As far as load times, the game took a minute to load, but after that, dying or restarting at a previous checkpoint it took about 3-5 seconds
This biggest bug that I had was when dying a few times the game started over at the level beginning, or took me to a different level autosave. But that can be fixed by loading the latest checkpoint, but I hoped that is fixed soon anyway.

[jimasripper]

Someone stated that they released the older version of the demo by mistake.They are going to publish the new latest one next week.

[Vladplaya]

Wow, this is really useful post. I really appreciate F2dk for taking your time and making this. And I don't really care if they released alpha stage instead of final version of the game, or whatever... Seems like the Painkiller is not the same, and people say there is no real Co-op mod?

That's lame and sad, I guess I will just wait for Doom 4 and mods that people will make for it.