The new Painkiller is out now on Steam, and it brings me no pleasure to say that it's really not very good—although it does at least maintain the 20-year streak of Painkiller follow-ups being pale, flaccid imitations of the original.
Painkiller—intended as a reboot, I guess, hence coming to the table with the same unmodified name as the original—isn't a bad game, strictly speaking. I've only played the now-vanished demo that was available during the Steam Next Fest and so my thoughts are based strictly on that, but based on my time with it the new game seems like a reasonably competent, utterly unremarkable Doom-style co-op shooter.
NuPainkiller feels smaller and more constrained than the original, although the basic structure is similar: Enter an area, kill a bunch of guys, move forward, rinse and repeat. The full game features new weapons but the demo had only the stake gun, the electrodriver, and the famed whirling-blade Painkiller, all from the first game, and they all feel more or less like they did back then, although without the same sort of visceral "wow" factor—it's been 20 years, after all.
Anyway, Painkiller—the new one—is fine, really, in the sense that it's a videogame that looks reasonably good and runs reasonably well and did not do any harm to my PC. I can't think of any real reason to recommend it, but neither would I actively try to steer anyone away from it, although $40 is quite the ask when you can pick up Helldivers 2 or Arc Raiders (soon) for the same price.
That also seems to be more or less the reaction among players on Steam, where the new Painkiller sits with a "mixed" user rating, driven largely by the fact that it's really not what it says on the box. As one Steam user put it in their review, "If you wanted something like the OG Painkiller—stay away. If you want a pretty generic and borderline hectic forced co-op shooter—try it."
So, y'know. It's fine.
The big complaint, and it's a fair one, really is simply that it's not Painkiller. The 2004 debut game from Polish studio People Can Fly is a mash-up of absolutely bonkers levels, enemies, weapons, wailing heavy metal "battle music," and a story about a guy who loved his wife so much he accidentally killed her and now he has to do penance by singlehandledly killing the shit out of Lucifer's armies because God is, I dunno, busy or something. It's very weird and forcefully dumb, and yet it somehow came together in one of the most enduring cult-hit shooters of all time. Painkiller is a game that left a mark, and no effort to match it in subsequent years has even come close.
But it got me thinking: Is my attachment to the legend of Painkiller, a game I loved in my (relative) youth, clouding my vision? I've played through the OG more than twice, but it's been a long time since the last time, and we are all vulnerable to the gentle touch of nostalgia, after all.
Faced with this uncertainty, I embraced my responsibility as a Serious Journalist and reinstalled Painkiller Black, which includes the base game and 10-level Battle Out of Hell expansion. And it gives me great pleasure indeed to say that my memories are not rose-tinted: This game is great.
Painkiller Black on a modern (well, Windows 11-capable) PC runs well and looks fantastic. It felt a bit sluggish at first—no dashing or dodging to be found here—until I remembered: bunny-hopping. Painkiller is in fact a very fast-moving game, but you have to put a little effort into it if you want to put distance between yourself and all the hordes of axe-wielding monks, beer-bellied bikers, opera-loving ninja, and other such weirdos the game will throw at you. The guns boom, the bodies fly, the soundtrack rocks, and ragdolling doofs into a wall with a stake the size of a small tree never gets old.
The only issue I had was an inability to run the game in 4K. At 1080p, Painkiller—the old one—flowed like water on glass, but setting the resolution to 4K brought the whole thing to a near-standstill: The menu was literally running at a seconds-per-frame pace, and getting it back to a functional lower resolution was a real test of patience. It turns out that this is a known problem with the old game, and my pursuit of a fix led me to discover something very interesting: The Painkiller RTX Remix mod.
Painkiller RTX Remix is transformative. Painkiller looks great for a 20-year-old game, as I said, but the RTX Remix mod makes it look new. Lighting, reflections, shadows, enhanced enemies—it's an across-the-board update that literally made me say "holy shit" out loud. And I'm not alone in making that assessment: In August, Nvidia awarded Painkiller RTX Remix the "best overall" prize in its RTX Remix mod contest, a triumph that brings not just bragging rights but also a $20,000 prize for the dev team.
Now, a note of caution: Painkiller RTX Remix is a work in progress, and it was very janky during my time with it. It crashed when trying to load pre-mod saves, and sometimes when loading between levels, too. But when it worked (and to be clear, I put no effort into trying to troubleshoot, I just wanted to squeeze in a few levels for testing), holy shit. It was jaw-dropping, and the game's performance seemed untouched—I have no idea about frame rates but it was smooth as glass and that's good enough for me. If you had told me this was a Nightdive job, I'd have believed it.
At the end of the day, the new Painkiller is out, and it's fine, but there's no reason to recommend it over any of the new Doom games, or Borderlands 3 or 4, Wolfenstein, Ultrakill, or even Atomic Heart, which I maintain is very good. If you're looking at it because you're curious why the oldsters are all wound up about the original Painkiller, I'd very strongly urge you to just go play that instead—it's currently on sale for a couple bucks on GOG, and it may well be the best $2 shooter you ever buy. And if you're one of those oldsters eager to rekindle the flame? If you don't mind dicking around with manual mod installations, give the RTX Remix mod a shot. Trust me, it's the best thing to happen to Painkiller in 20 years.
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