The final SP map in this press preview involved a fight with a huge demon-lookingboss tower with multiple floors, and there was a bit of a trick to beating him. Inthis level, you get access to all the weapons, but it turns out the shotgun seemedto be best against him once I ran out of chaingun ammo. Overall, this boss was really fun to fight, but I found it way too difficult to actually avoid his attacks – it seems that People Can Fly knew this too, as I actually ran out ofhealth twice and was magically healed both times. Hopefully they’ll be adjustingencounters like this in the next couple of months.

One of the most immediatly obvious differences between Painkiller andSerious Sam is that this game includes ragdoll physics for all of thegame’s multitudes of enemies. On top of that, the enemies can all be blown awayin some pretty gory deaths, with body parts flying everywhere. If you fire astake someone near a wall, it’ll pin them to the wall and the body will hanglimply. So far, the ragdoll effects are really exaggerated here, which doeswind up giving the game a slightly silly feeling that goes against the game’s atmosphere, but it sure was fun to kill enemies like this. Here’s a game whereover-the-top physics are actually somewhat appropriate – at least, I thought so.

Once you kill enough enemies, yourcharacter will go into a very strange (but cool) looking mode where you do extradamage for a little while. Time also slows down a bit in this mode. In multiplayer, this is a powerup you grab instead, and you onlyget the crazy visuals and extra damage.

The game does include some very hard-hitting sound effects, and the ambience wasspooky without being overwhelmingly moody. Overall, I have to give People Can Fly a lot of credit for their sound design so far in Painkiller.

The multiplayer in Painkiller felt a bit more like classic Quake deathmatchthan anything else, with tight maps, fast movement, a quad-damage style powerupthat’s not so easy to get to, armor and weapons that can be controlled by a player with good timing,and teleporters. The teleporters actually display a shimmering image of what theother side looks like, but sadly you can’t actually see players moving around oranything moving at all on the other side of the teleporters.

I am fairly impressed by this Painkiller demo. While it was dubbed amultiplayer press build, it included a nice sampling of single player action aswell. Of course, advanced AI or high-level strategy are left by the wayside in agame like this, but I don’t think anyone can reasonably expect that out of a gamewith such fast pacing as Painkiller. I’m definitely looking forward to therelease of this shooter in early 2004.