Review by Steerpike
March 2005

And Simple Is Good

Painkiller was something of a surprise hit in 2004, drawing raves for its elegant, beautiful engine and brusque simplicity of gameplay. In many ways, Painkiller is the spiritual successor to DOOM and Serious Sam—a shooter in which you shoot, in which your sole objective is to unleash ordnance upon whatever hideous thing happens to present itself to your crosshair. The first-person shooter genre has come to resemble a digital Winchester house, so laden with additions crammed haphazardly onto the basic framework that the entire thing teeters alarmingly, groaning with Byzantine disproportion. Painkiller is unburdened by inventories, stats, skills—all of it.

And yet there was a depth to Painkiller far beyond that found in more "full-featured" contemporaries. It is a bold, deeply profound rumination on one of humanity's most considered and least understood mysteries—what happens to us when we die. Its exploration of the question is managed not through narrative (Painkiller isn't burdened by one of those, either), but through the creators' vision of the world beyond. They brought the land of the dead to life in ways no one else had really considered.

People Can Fly followed up its surprise hit with Battle out of Hell, a ten-level addition. It is an expansion in the purest sense, drawing on what's already there and extending where feasible. There is nothing new, no additional ingredients threatening to ruin the delicious soup of the overall game. If you liked Painkiller, you'll like Battle out of Hell. If you didn't like Painkiller, then there's something wrong about you and you're different and strange. Everyone else thinks Painkiller is great.

Though quite good, Battle out of Hell is not as good as Painkiller itself. It feels very much like an expansion pack, in that there is a distinct "this one doesn't have to be as good as the original" flavor to it. And it exhibits a few peculiar flaws that were not present in the original—flaws that were consciously introduced, which is bewildering. But it's a blast.

Welcome to Purgatory; Please Take a Number

When we last left Daniel Garner, he'd been stuck in Purgatory for 30 years, waiting to get into Heaven. His wife Catherine (both were killed in a car accident) was already up there, probably being wooed by a sexy harp player, and Daniel missed her. An angel named Sammael offered to get him in sight unseen if Daniel would help thwart a planned invasion of Heaven by the Devil's legions. Along the way Daniel got help from Eve, who's been stuck in Purgatory since the apple scandal. Daniel killed the four generals who commanded the demon army, theoretically ruining the invasion. But Lucifer, in a fit of spite, grabbed Eve and took her to Hell. Daniel sacrificed his ticket to Heaven in order to go down there and save her, which was a pretty nice thing to do.

Hell is a favorite site for video game adventures, but most developers stick with trusty standbys: horned statuary, eviscerated corpses, lava, what have you. Not People Can Fly. The art directors at that studio have such gifts that I wish they could be cloned and distributed. Their avant-garde depiction of the nether world is very different from the blah Hell we see in most games. You only see it at the very end, the mind-blowing final confrontation when all the pieces come together and the whole picture is finally visible.

Painkiller's Hell is a diorama of our species' capacity for self-destruction, an open-air museum in which every wicked deed, every cruelty, every occasion on which humans have displayed their ugliness is frozen in a drop of crystallized time. It is a bleak and empty place, the presence of the damned belied only by their invisible screams. Hell in Painkiller isn't some brimstony "look how scary!" environment, it's a ghastly exhibition of our abject and ongoing failure to become what God imagined we might one day become. Worse still is the revelation that Hell is a chronological succession of horrors, proving that humanity is not growing better or wiser, but more ugly and brutal. The deeper you go into Hell, the worse it gets, because the deeper you go, the more you learn about human beings. In short, the Hell of Painkiller is exactly what Hell would be like—not a dark reflection of Heaven, but a grim accounting of Earth.

Daniel wiped the floor with Lucifer in Painkiller, which is ostensibly a good thing. Problem is, that game's finale strongly implied that Lucifer was sort of the Woodrow Wilson of infernal politics: he was the boss, but he wasn't able to get much done. Battle out of Hell's opening pretty much cements that implication. The demon lord Alastor—Lucifer's former number one and top general—is the new guy on the Throne of Bone. And if Lucifer was Woodrow Wilson, Alastor is George W. Bush. In fact, he wants to invade Heaven now, damn the risks, generals or no. After all, he still has a huge army milling around Purgatory, and his view is that there's no point in having an army unless you invade something with it.

Things looked grim for Daniel and Eve at the end of Painkiller, but Eve manages to summon up one last shred of magic, transporting the two of them back to the dubious safety of Purgatory. Understanding that Alastor now represents as great a threat as Lucifer ever did, Daniel sets off to prevent the invasion of Heaven once and for all. Thus is the stage set for Battle out of Hell—an ironic title indeed, since you spend only a tiny fraction of the game there.

We already know Daniel and Eve from the original game, but there are a few more opportunities to explore their characters in this expansion. Eve is kind of bitchy—more so than she was before. There's nary a "thank you for voluntarily entering the Kingdom of Satan to rescue me, thereby denying yourself any but the most remote chance at ever reaching Heaven" from her. In fact, she's really rather bossy. In the plus column, she is slightly less naked; either complaints about her portrayal reached the ears of People Can Fly or someone loaned her a bikini top while she was swimming in the lake of fire.

Daniel, meanwhile, remains a bit of an enigma. We never really learn much about him, so it's up to our imaginations to fill gaps in his character. Painkiller makes it clear that he's a doting husband, but despite this I always got a very sinister vibe from Daniel—as though he were a reformed hit man who quit the life after marriage but retains the capacity for unimaginable cruelty. After all, he didn't get into Heaven, and the reason why is never supplied. He certainly handles weapons well for a thirty-something suburbanite. I don't know if People Can Fly actually put much thought into developing Daniel as a character, so of course all this is speculation.

Painkiller has a story, one of impressive depth if you're willing to mull it over, but very little of that story is told through the narrative. I find this appealing from an academic perspective, because it's solid proof that fiction isn't the only mechanism by which a game can exhibit thematic potency. On the other hand, a professional writer could have done some interesting things with the game's story (just as a professional cast could have done something with the dialogue; the acting is hideous) and I would like to have seen a bit more storytelling in the expansion.

Painkiller is very stylish and says many positive things about the studio's talent, but there is more to it than that. People Can Fly is a Polish studio (don't forget Poland!), and a civilization's traumas affect its art. A taste of Japanese art or culture sings songs about how the atom bomb can influence a societal muse. Watch a Verhoeven film to see the artistic vision of a man who spent his most impressionable years growing up in a Nazi-occupied country. And there is no doubt that any nation's art would be profoundly affected by life behind the Iron Curtain.

We can learn a lot about a people based on their art—especially the collective and silent miseries of which they themselves may not be consciously aware. There is a magnificent bleakness, a nihilism, about the universe of Painkiller. The canvas of the game says something about the culture from which it sprang. It is beautiful in the same way desolation is beautiful, as though ennui could be captured in oils. You simply wouldn't have the same game if Painkiller had been developed by a western studio.

Singin' in the Pain

The proprietary Pain engine is back, doing the grunt work for Battle out of Hell. Pain is still very impressive looking, with slick liquid effects, nice lighting and expansive draw distance. It still looks good almost a year after its first appearance. Pain remains highly competitive with the Lithtech and Crytek engines, and with the current iteration of Unreal technology, though it's really not a match for DOOM 3 or Source. Nor does it claim to be.

But, strangely, there are a few things that look worse. This is what I was referring to when I said there were consciously introduced flaws in the expansion. While the game engine looks fine, the cinematics—admittedly few and far between in Battle out of Hell—are considerably worse. The (fairly) realistic hair seen in the original has been replaced by toothpaste strands, resembling carefully molded strings of Play-Doh more than actual human coiffure. Cloth effects are similarly reduced, in the cinematics and engine alike. Flapping textiles make for a cool visual, and they're essentially gone from this game.

Furthermore, they did something weird to Daniel's face. He was never going to win the Brad Pitt Memorial Stud Award, but in Battle out of Hell he's been saddled with a twisted grimace that demotes him from homely to downright ugly. It's a constant sneer that suggests he's smelling something foul and is very, very angry about it. Alastor, too, is notably different and worse looking. This isn't a Max Payne kind of "we got a better model" switch, it's bad art.

Another negative is the fact that the engine's performance is diminished, despite no obvious improvements to overall technology. In the time between Painkiller and Battle out of Hell, I've upgraded from an Athlon 2800+/512 MB/Radeon 9700 to an Athlon 64 3800+/1 GB/Radeon X700. While the old machine could play Painkiller at 1600×1200 with all effects maxed out, Battle out of Hell crawls at that resolution on my new computer.

All that bad stuff said, Battle out of Hell looks great, with sweepingly artsy level design and nearly as much atmosphere as its predecessor. Environments run the gamut, alternately dark and light, grim and weirdly cheerful, open and claustrophobic. Despite the relative gloom of the game concept, both Painkiller and Battle out of Hell aren't afraid to use bright, vivid colors and beautiful locales to further underscore the quality of their art direction, which is very consciously geared toward communicating their view of the afterlife to the player. It's another point in favor of the studio's incredible artistic talent.

There really never was much to say about the audio in Painkiller. It's "fine," which is to say that you're never really aware of it. The music and effects are neither noticeably bad nor noticeably good, though the effortless segue into thumping rock during combat is very nicely achieved. I do wish the acting didn't make Keanu Reeves seem like Olivier by comparison.

Step One: Begin Game. Step Two: Reload.

Battle out of Hell is significantly more challenging than the original Painkiller. At times, it is frustratingly difficult; this expansion will task even talented shooter fans. What's worse, you have to finish the game on the highest difficulty level to see the "real" ending. That is an extraordinarily difficult accomplishment.

Gameplay, while harder, is basically the same. You'll remember that the structure of these games isn't one of linear progression so much as it is a compartmentalized series of battles within each level. You enter an area, the doors lock and monsters swarm. Once all of the monsters are defeated, the doors open and you move on to the next zone.

They improved the compass, which had been rather faulty, and tweaked AI so enemies coordinate attacks more effectively. You are also given a couple of new weapons to help out. The Boltcaster will quickly become a favorite among snipers; its primary fire launches four metal spikes with great speed. It's kind of a Stake Gun on steroids, with an added zoom feature and secondary fire that flings a bucketful of bouncy grenades. You'll also find a new submachine gun that doubles as a flamethrower. While the sub isn't really too useful—bullets are scarce, rate of fire is low, and your arsenal already includes a minigun—the flamethrower does come in handy. It's a lot like the beloved and eponymous Painkiller weapon in that using it requires some artistry: setting a charging enemy on fire isn't necessarily the wisest course of action.

One thing that's not really clear is whether Battle out of Hell is an according-to-Hoyle expansion pack or a set of levels that didn't make it into the original game. My guess is the former, since you're fighting all new monsters (some of which do bear a striking resemblance to reskinned old monsters), but it's hard to say for sure. The shortage of narrative means that the Painkiller games have to depend on great level design to remain engaging. A few questionable missions aside, the original boasted fabulous level design. Battle out of Hell is about one notch down on the quality scale. Many levels—the first four especially—are easily as good as those in Painkiller; the other six are a little more dubious. None are downright bad, but one does get the idea that People Can Fly chose to take it easy a bit on some of these.

In Painkiller, accomplishing certain goals in each level allowed Daniel to pick up Black Tarot cards. He could then spend collected gold to play them, each of which offered a one-time or permanent benefit. In Battle out of Hell, you begin with quite a collection and can again pick up other cards along the way. There's only one problem: while the prerequisites to get cards in Painkiller ranged from simple to reasonably challenging, in Battle out of Hell they range from nearly impossible to absolutely impossible. Gold, also, is scarce. You find gold coins in most destroyable objects, and though level descriptions always indicated huge amounts of gold, I never found more than a handful. I later learned that this is because you receive large gold bonuses for the holy items hidden in each level, but they're so well concealed that you'd need a dowsing rod to find them. These flaws drastically reduce the influence that Black Tarot has on the game, since you're not likely to acquire new cards and you'll rarely have enough cash to play the ones you've got.

Generally speaking, though, the gameplay of Battle out of Hell has the same adrenaline-soaked excitement of the original. Wild firefights, huge minibosses and the occasional challenging puzzle are rolled up into the same tight, clean, delicious package. If video games were desserts, Painkiller and Battle out of Hell would be baklava. I cannot stress enough, however, the point I made at the beginning: if you liked Painkiller, you'll like the expansion. If not, there's nothing here that will change your mind. The same goes for the updated multiplayer—a few enhancements are included, but nothing that will convert a naysayer.

What's Next

I'm very eager to see what People Can Fly plan to do now. They're on solid financial ground, since Painkiller sold quite well. A sequel is conceivable, though personally I hope they try something entirely different. The core team at the studio created a game called Odium (Gorky-17 outside the US) at another studio in the 90s. Odium was a tactical, turn-based game along the lines of X-Com; like Painkiller it was rich in artistic and thematic syrup. I'd love to see People Can Fly do another game like this, because Odium was rushed and flawed and deserved better treatment. Besides, the shooter genre is plenty crowded.

We're seeing a major rise in eastern European game development, as studios from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic and others turn out unique, compelling games with a decidedly different flavor than their western counterparts. A lot of their originality has to do, once again, with the differing artistic viewpoints of separated cultures. If this trend continues, the region will soon be a major development capital.

I was almost as impressed with Battle out of Hell as I was with the original Painkiller, due in no small part to the fact that the developers very consciously stuck to a proven formula. "More of the same" has come to have a negative connotation, but if "the same" is good, how can more of it be bad? Battle out of Hell fits this argument nicely. While it's not quite as good as the original, it is only an expansion pack, and expansions aren't really expected to shoulder the same responsibilities as full-fledged games. At the very least it's about eight hours of extreme fun, and you can't really say no to that. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: People Can Fly
Publisher: Dreamcatcher
Release Date: December 2004

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
1.5 GHz PIII or AMD Athlon
384 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
1.2 GB available hard disk space
64 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible video card (NVIDIA GeForce 3 or better)
DirectX 8.1b or better compatible sound card
Keyboard and mouse

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