OUR RATING: 7.2 VERY GOOD About our ratings

TANGIBLES: Gameplay: 7 Visuals: 9 Audio: 7 Value: 7 Quality: 7

Why you should buy it: Not Available Why you should rent it: Not Available

UNIQUE RATING: 7.2 SUGGESTION: N/A

Painkiller is, without a doubt, one of the simplest First-Person Shooters you'll ever play. In fact, let's not confine its simplicity to one genre; Painkiller is one of the most straightforward games you'll ever play. This horror themed run-and-gun shooter is the work of Polish developers People Can Fly; you shouldn't be embarrassed to admit you haven't heard of them either because Painkiller is their debut title, and they couldn't have begun with anything more grass roots.

You'd expect there to be no kind of plot attached to Painkiller's gameplay but the developers have actually tried, it seems, to engross you in the world they've created. There are plenty of lengthy cut-scenes that laboriously explain Daniel's (the main character) predicament, but these only serve to take you away from the best bits, the action. Moreover, the cut-scenes seem rather pointless when the game throws up so many random scenarios (a WWI airfield one minute, Hell another) that it's impossible to believe in Daniel and his quandary. It'd be fine if Painkiller was a tongue-in-cheek horror first-person shooter, but the game takes itself far too seriously. Painkiller is neither here nor there in this respect.

The plot goes as follows: you play as Daniel Garner who dies in a car crash at the beginning of the game alongside his pretty wife. He finds himself in purgatory, a place somewhere between heaven and hell, though it bears no resemblances to heaven. It's a series of dilapidated locales overrun by Lucifer's army, and Daniel must kill Lucifer and his army of beasts before he's allowed entry into heaven. Quite why Daniel has been chosen is never made clear, but it seems he must erase his sins by way of killing Lucifer and Lucifer's four right hand men, as well as his thousands of minions.

Take Operation Flashpoint's realism-drenched gameplay and compare it to Painkiller's and you'll be faced with two glaringly different games. In fact, there's not even an option to crouch or reload your gun in Painkiller and these sorts of options are taken for granted in an age when realism and complexity is considered appropriate. There's nothing wrong with Painkiller's old-skool, and somewhat fresh approach either, but omitting moves such as crouching is ludicrous, in a sense, and compounds Painkiller's shallow nature.

What hits home hard, and fast, is that Painkiller is a no nonsense First-Person Shooter. When you start firing, the heavy metal starts pumping, and enemies start flying. Simply put, Painkiller is a Hollywood B movie action flick at its purest. Daniel even turns into a super insane mass murderer after he's topped some of the game's more important villains, and its an impressive sight to behold.

There are only five weapons to be found, but each and everyone has upgrades for it. Whilst the rocket launcher is powerful on it's own, it's superb when upgraded to a rocket launcher/chaingun combination and this can deal with nearly every enemy found in the game, if not all. These combinations are hardly revolutionary however, and you get the feeling it was the developers way of bypassing the process of making numerous weapon models. The combinations also don't make much sense; a rocket launcher combined with a chaingun' It would have made for a more satisfactory experience had People Can Fly included a new weapon for each type of firing mode.

Painkiller has some great fights; the guns all fire well and the enemies don't just flop down to the ground, they're propelled in gravity defying style. Shooting barrels will prompt a splendid explosion too, and there are a variety of demons to kill during the game, though all of them exhibit the same tactics.

A tirade of heavy metal music usually starts up at beginning of a big battle, which happens a lot. The music is the exact opposite of the game's name; more of a pain inducer than a painkiller. It seems People Can Fly only chose one track for the game; a rock song that sticks to a couple of notes and repeats and repeats until you're sick of it. Obviously if you're a fan of this kind of outlandish music you'll be fine with it. At any rate, you really ought not be playing Painkiller if your idea of fun is a glass of wine and Beethoven's five symphony playing in the background.