Painkiller Hell & Damnation

I went in expecting a straightforward nostalgia trip, and in one sense that's exactly what Hell & Damnation delivers - then it quietly reminds you the trip has a toll booth at every junction. The Farm 51 rebuilt the original 2004 Painkiller on Unreal Engine 3, but instead of delivering a complete experience, the base game ships with only 11 levels while the rest sit behind a wall of paid DLC packs. That structural decision poisons the well before you even fire a shot, and it's the loudest complaint you'll find from players across reviews and community posts alike. When the shooting actually starts, though, there's a primal satisfaction here that most modern FPS games have abandoned entirely. No reload animations, no regenerating health, no cover system. You run, you circle-strafe, you aggress. The weapons reward momentum: the signature Painkiller blender requires you to physically sprint through enemy clusters to use it effectively, the stake thrower pins enemies to walls with chunky thwack feedback, and the new Soulcatcher adds a genuinely clever combo layer where absorbing enough souls lets you force enemies to fight each other. Collect 66 souls and you briefly flip into demon mode for a one-shot rampage - a small but well-designed pressure valve that keeps horde encounters from feeling static. Dual-fire modes on most weapons add meaningful variety to what is, structurally, a very stripped-back loop. The Tarot card system gives the game modest replayability. Cards act like challenge modifiers - meet specific conditions in a level (kill a quota with one weapon, hit an optional time target) and you unlock cards that alter difficulty or bend rules in subsequent runs, not unlike the skull system from the original Halo. It's thin, but it's there, and it gives completionists a reason to replay stages beyond pure score-chasing. Co-op support for the full campaign is legitimately the best argument for picking this version over the older Black Edition, and Survival mode adds an eight-player horde option on top of standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture-the-flag, and duel modes. In practice, online lobbies have been mostly empty for years, so treat multiplayer as a bonus rather than a draw. The weaknesses are familiar and well-documented. Enemy AI is purely directional - they sprint at you and that's the extent of the strategy. Boss fights are enormous spectacles of scale (multiple stories tall) but their AI glitches make them susceptible to corner cheese and environmental snags. The campaign on its own clocks in at roughly six hours, which is short even by arena shooter standards. Critics at launch were split cleanly along ideological lines: people who wanted a Doom-style arcade rush found something to enjoy; anyone expecting the full fat original experience in a modern wrapper left disappointed. The honest bottom line for 2025: if you have never played the original Painkiller and the DLC-inclusive bundle hits a genuinely low price, the loop is fast, tactile, and uncomplicated in a way that scratches a specific itch. If you already own Painkiller Black Edition, nothing here is going to surprise you, and the condensed level count will likely frustrate. The core moment-to-moment shooting works. The packaging around it is where the trust breaks down.

Alex · Scout Team

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