Painkiller

I went in curious but cautious, and about ten minutes into my first raid I had a Stakegun pinning a demon to a wall while two teammates carved through the flanks with a Shotgun and Rocket Launcher. That moment felt great. The problem is the game has roughly that same moment, on repeat, across nine missions, and it starts showing the seams faster than it should. Anshar Studios has built what is essentially a three-player co-op raid shooter with gothic dressing. You pick one of four characters - Ink, Void, Sol, or Roch - each carrying a modest passive perk (Void bumps your flat weapon damage by ten percent, Sol gives you a fifty percent ammo capacity boost, and so on). You carry two guns at a time, chosen from a pool of six: the returning Stakegun, an SMG, a Hand Cannon, a Shotgun, a Rocket Launcher, and the Electrodriver, which bounces disks off walls in pleasingly chaotic ways. Every weapon has its own upgrade tree with branching secondary fire modes - drill-bore stakes versus triple-shot stakes, SMG rounds versus lightning bolts - and that progression layer is genuinely fun to prod at. The iconic melee Painkiller weapon shows up as a permanent third slot, a spinning blade that shreds demons and causes them to drop ammo, keeping you aggressive and in motion the way the best arena shooters demand. Tarot cards slot in as consumable passive buffs, and combining them in co-op creates satisfying multipliers that reward communication without requiring it. Movement is fast and vertical. Jump pads and grapple points are scattered everywhere, and the arenas are built for air time. The Rogue Angel mode adds a roguelite layer on top of the main Raid structure, dropping players into randomised handcrafted arenas for survival runs that add some replay texture. Performance on PC is reportedly clean, with smooth frame rates and very few bugs at launch - a genuine point in the game's favour right now. The soundtrack is aggressive metal that syncs well to the chaos, and the gothic environments carry enough visual menace to keep the atmosphere alive between encounters. Here is where the honest accounting gets uncomfortable. The campaign spans nine Raids across three acts, and most of them funnel down to one of two activities: kill waves of demons, or fill barrels with demon blood and slot them into specific points to progress. That second objective type sounds more varied than it feels. The story connecting it all is negligible - four characters with barely sketched backstories snark through Purgatory without generating any real reason to care about the outcome. Longtime fans of the 2004 original hoping for Daniel Garner, the single-player structure, or even just the tight gothic atmosphere of People Can Fly's game will find almost none of that DNA here. The two-weapon carry limit also cuts against the original's anything-goes arsenal feel. Solo players are technically supported via AI bots that competently fill squad slots and will revive you when downed, but the game's bones are built for three humans and it shows when you're flying solo. The community reception is split roughly down the middle on Steam, and that split makes sense. If you have two friends ready to jump into a punchy, uncomplicated horde shooter with satisfying weapon feedback and a metal soundtrack that slaps, Painkiller 2025 delivers a genuinely fun few evenings. If you are a solo player expecting a spiritual successor to one of the best boomer shooters of the 2000s, the gap between expectation and reality is going to sting. It is a game doing one thing well - kinetic, no-reload gunplay in vertical arenas - surrounded by a thinner content shell than the price point probably warrants.

Alex · Scout Team

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