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When the original Painkiller arrived in 2004, it carved out a special place in PC gaming history with its breakneck single-player campaign, creative weaponry, and gothic atmosphere. Twenty-one years later, someone at the Saber clearly thought the best way to revive this beloved franchise was to strip away everything fans adored and replace it with a hollow live service co-op shooter. Spoiler alert: they were catastrophically wrong.
A Painkiller in Name Only
Let's address the demon in the room immediately - this isn't really Painkiller. Sure, there are demons. Yes, you're fighting through hellish landscapes. But calling this a Painkiller game is like calling Arkane's Prey a Prey game. We know it doesn't make sense. The DNA of the original - that intense, focused single-player experience that had you battling increasingly nightmarish hordes - has been completely excised in favour of something that feels more like a bargain bin Destiny clone with a gothic paint job, and that makes me frustratingly sad.
Instead of a proper campaign, you're thrust into what the developers call "raids" - self-contained missions you tackle either in co-op with up to three other players or alongside AI bots. Except these raids aren't particularly fun, strategic, or memorable. They're repetitive slogs through demon-infested levels that all start to blur together after your second or third attempt. The AI bots, meanwhile, possess all the tactical awareness of a chocolate teapot, often standing about uselessly whilst you do the heavy lifting. But I don't blame them - they don't know better.
Four Characters, Zero Personality
The game offers four playable characters, each fitting neatly into the traditional co-op archetypes you've seen a thousand times before. There's the tank, the damage dealer, the support, and...well, you get the idea. Visually, they look decent enough, with solid character designs that at least attempt to fit the dark fantasy aesthetic.
Unfortunately, the moment they open their mouths, any goodwill evaporates faster than holy water on a demon's tongue. The voice acting ranges from bland to genuinely irritating, with repetitive barks and quips that'll have you reaching for the audio settings within the first hour to turn off voice.
Gameplay: The Good, The Bad, and The Boring
Credit where it's due - the moment-to-moment gunplay is reasonably solid. Movement feels fluid, performance is smooth thanks to high frame-rates, and when you're in the thick of combat, there's a satisfying weight to the action. The weapons themselves aren't terrible either, offering a decent variety of demonic implements of destruction. There's also a tarot card system that adds some build customisation, which is nice, though it's hardly revolutionary - we've seen similar mechanics in countless other games. Basically, you can activate cards before every raid to get extra boosts like dealing more damage, getting more stuff from killing demons and so on.
The controls, however, can be a bit dodgy at times. During platforming sections, I found the controls occasionally acting up, resulting in several frustrating deaths that felt entirely unfair. When you're already struggling to maintain interest, these technical hiccups don't help matters.
Then there are the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles. Calling them puzzles is generous; they're more like extremely obvious button-pressing exercises that insult your intelligence. Stand on this pressure plate to open a door. Now someone else stands on that pressure plate to open another door. Congratulations, you've solved the "puzzle" and can now access the loot chest. These sequences take less than a minute to solve and contribute absolutely nothing to the experience beyond padding out the runtime. They're not engaging, they're not clever, and they're certainly not fun.
Audiovisual Purgatory
The graphics sit in an uncomfortable middle ground - they're technically competent but distinctly last-gen in their execution. Character models and environmental textures wouldn't look out of place on a PlayStation 4, which feels disappointing for a 2025 release. That said, the art direction does have some merit. Locations manage to nail that dark, oppressive atmosphere with gothic architecture and hellish vistas that should make you feel like you're genuinely fighting through the underworld.
The problem is, everything feels overwhelmingly "video gamey". You never quite shake the sensation that you're running through carefully constructed levels rather than exploring a convincing world. It's all a bit artificial, lacking the immersive quality that might have given this game a bit more soul it desperately needs.
As for the soundtrack, it's a massive missed opportunity. Yes, there's aggressive metal music blaring away, but it's somehow both loud and forgettable - generic thrashing that fails to leave any impression. When you consider the industry-leading work id Software has done with the DOOM soundtracks, creating genuinely memorable and pulse-pounding scores, this feels particularly anaemic by comparison. The music is there, but to be fair, any fast metal song would do an equally good job.
A Content Desert at Launch
Perhaps most damningly, there's simply not enough game here at launch. The available content feels sparse, suggesting the development team had grand post-launch plans but shipped a barebones product to meet a deadline. This strategy might work when you've got a passionate playerbase eager for more, but the Steam numbers tell a different story. The game launched with an all-time peak of barely 800 concurrent players, which is absolutely disastrous for a supposedly live service title.
How can you sustain a live service game when nobody's playing it? The answer is, you can't. Without players, there's no community, no revenue stream, and ultimately no future. I struggle to see this one surviving past the first quarter.
The Ultimate Betrayal
Here's the crux of it: this game represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Painkiller special. Hardcore fans wanted a successor to the tight, thrilling single-player campaigns of old with updated graphics, modern mechanics, but that same core experience. Nobody was clamouring for a live service co-op shooter with no proper story mode.
Multiplayer and co-op modes would have been a brilliant addition, the side salad to complement the main course, the fries alongside your burger. Instead, we've been served nothing but chips and told to be grateful. It's a baffling design decision that reeks of cynical trend-chasing rather than genuine artistic vision.
Final Verdict
The new Painkiller is a soulless, uninspired reboot that abandons everything the franchise stood for in pursuit of live service trends that are already past their sell-by date. With no meaningful campaign, repetitive gameplay, forgettable audio, and a worrying lack of content, it fails both as a Painkiller game and as a standalone shooter.
I never thought fighting hordes of demonic creatures from hell could feel this tedious, but here we are. The game has no clear vision, and certainly no soul - just a hollow approximation of a once-great franchise that deserved so much better. For long-time fans, this isn't just disappointing; it's a betrayal. And for that alone, it deserves to be cast into the depths of hell alongside the demons it depicts.
Perhaps the real pain was the friends we didn't make along the way.
The Good
Good moment-to-moment gunplay with fluid movement- Strong art direction
- The card system adds some light customisation options
- Characters have solid visual designs
The Bad
No proper single-player campaign- Live service model nobody asked for
- Repetitive, uninspired mission structure
- Terrible, repetitive voice acting
- Generic, forgettable metal soundtrack
- Insultingly simple puzzle elements
- Scarce content at launch
- Complete betrayal of the franchise's legacy
