What with the march of progress, meanwhile, these daisy-chains of oncoming bodily nightmares can be sliced, diced and impaled in far more gruesome ways than one's mind could contemplate a decade ago.įrom the initial graveyard skellingtons through to the witches rocking out on stage in the Opera House, knife-wielding urchins in the orphanage and Battle Out of Hell's epic rollercoaster ride, Painkiller HD is chewing gum for the eyes and repetitive strain injury for your click-finger. 14 iconic levels from the original game (and its excellent expansion pack Battle out of Hell) have been reconstructed and filled out with a wide range of creatures from the Painkiller menagerie. Game bosses, who love a game of peek-a-boo, occasionally make their presence felt before their allotted level. It's been roughly abused by a range of different developers in the likes of Overdose, Resurrection, Redemption and Recurring Evil - so, this Halloween, The Farm 51's Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is out to right former wrongs with an Unreal Engine cover version. If a pact was signed to keep the Painkiller brand alive, however, it must have been a little Faustian. Opinion was split over the relative charms of that first Painkiller (your correspondent sometimes felt quite alone in his worship of the stake-gun) but a loyal fanbase and the longevity granted by back-to-basics twitch multiplayer gave it an extended lifespan. Lunatic fire-and-forget gameplay, back-flipping hoodlums, goliath bosses and some astoundingly beautiful panoramas of the underworld all conspired to create a game that was, arguably, a more direct successor to Doom than the (then forthcoming) Doom 3. Theirs was a deranged shooter that saw Serious Sam infused with equal parts of Hieronymus Bosch and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Hell & Damnation is a modern reincarnation of what Polish developer People Can Fly, now responsible for Gears of War: Judgment, ushered onto our mortal plane back in 2004. Mad axe-monks, skeletal WW1 soldiers in gas masks, children splayed in two by shotgun blasts and men eternally trapped in their duvet covers come laundry day: all desperate for a meet and greet with hero Daniel Garner's whirring blade. Hell, by Painkiller's estimation, is other people running endlessly towards you.
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