by Rick - January 31, 2005

Painkiller: Battle out of Hell is the expansion for the award winning first person shooter Painkiller, in which you play a dead man attempting to cleanse his soul of whatever sin he committed to deserve doing time in purgatory. In Battle out of hell, your character has just been chased out of Hell by Alastor, the supposed leader of the armies of hell, and now must find your way back into the pit to prevent the demonic forces from taking the halfway point to heaven.

The Whirly-Do

BOOH picks up right where the Painkiller left off, and much like other expansions in other series, they assume you're already seasoned from the original and throw you right into some fairly challenging levels from the start. If you think the levels have are a decent challenge, just wait until you attempt the Black Tarot Cards challenges - they very easily put the 1st Painkiller's to shame, adding quite a bit of replay to an otherwise very straightforward shooter. Along with the Tarot Card system, pretty much everything you've come to expect makes a return here: you'll collect souls of dead monsters, money to buy the easier-to-come-by cards, and have plenty of hybrid weapons. There's nothing like freezing a monster with the ice gun and then shattering it with the attached shotgun!

Speaking of weapons, the additions to the family fit in perfectly. Two new weapons are available to the intrepid player who manages to cross their paths. A SMG and Flamethrower make the first, and a Bolt Gun/Heater combination composes the second. The Bolt Gun is actually my favorite weapon, save the main weapon of the game, the Painkiller (or Whirly-Do as I prefer to call it). The Bolt Gun acts a lot like the Stake gun, only it fires off five razor sharp spikes with amazing accuracy. It also sports a nifty scope for picking off the forces of hell from a safe and comfy distance. The Flamethrower that is attached to the SMG is also quite handy, and the levels are often designed in a way which requires you to use the new weapons, either as part of a Tarot Card challenge (in the Asylum level you can ONLY use the Bolt Gun - eek!) or with enemies which can only be killed by the flamethrower. It's nice to see a developer making a practical use of new weapons instead of just throwing them in for kicks, something that has often plagued sequels and expansions.

My biggest complaint is that it was tough every now and again when you had to walk up fire escape or a caved in piece of wall and the game decided that you had to jump and run over and over again just to slowly advance up the incline. Perhaps the developers could have made the incline less steep, or overridden the physics engine to allow easy access. A minor problem, but enough to give me a small headache.

The Many Faces of Evil

I must say that Battle out of Hell had some pretty impressive graphics and is a nice upgrade on the original. Higher resolution textures, crazier character models, and some brand new lighting effects make this already capable engine shine. Just make sure your machine can handle it before you jack up the settings, as a fairly high video card will be needed to fully appreciate it.

In addition to the beautiful textures and the high detail models, the game also sported many little tid-bits placed carefully along the wall to disturb (or please) the casual observer. I saw paintings of demonic bodies twisted and mangled. I saw unintelligible scribblings scrawled across the walls in some unknown crimson medium (I think it was lipstick). With evil hiding in the grain of the very hard wood floor you�re walking on� its hard to fight off the immersion the developers surely wanted you to experience. Some of the environments are downright creepy and this game fully earns it's Mature rating. Play the first level and you'll see what I mean - it takes place in an orphanage with tons of dead children attacking you, something I doubt a mainstream movie title could get away with since it's a pretty blatant depiction of violence against children, so parental discretion is advised.

Once you get past how morbid some of the enemies (and environments) are, you can start to appreciate each one's unique look and feel, which is one of the best things about the Painkiller series. Since each level has a different theme, you'll rarely see recycled textures and environments, and even rarer is recycled enemies, which is probably PK:BOOH's biggest strength. From shooting clowns in an evil carnival, doctors and nurses in an asylum, to a zombie-infested city which feels like it was directly inspired by Dawn of the Dead, locations are varied and keep the action fresh.

BOOH finds the series also making better use of the Havok physics than in the original. At one point in the game, you'll encounter 2 monsters who levitate cars and then chuck them at you while you try to take out zombies, making for one of the crazier and more difficult fights of the game (excluding bosses).

One of my only gripes with the graphics of the game is that the animation for the people speaking in cut scenes was possibly some of the worst I�ve ever seen. And it doesn�t make much sense for it to be that way. The models were pretty good looking, and all the other animations where natural and well done� yet when the character�s spoke, it was like watching a dubbed Japanese movie, only with less tentacles. A small price to pay I suppose, but it simply didn�t do much for the game.

Things That Go Bump In the Night... And the Day Too

The sound in BOOH was pretty standard. Creepy screams echoing through the many dark corners of Purgatory, demon children laughing just beyond vision, and the howls of the truly frightening of monsters from the pit.

The music was fine, not the best I've ever heard, but far far from the worst. It fit with the theme of the game and, with exception to the battle music (which often upset the mood), did a fair job of maintaining the level of immersion. The voice acting heard in the cut scenes was also pretty standard. Though, as I said, it hardly synched up with the movements of the character�s mouths.

All in all, I think the audio could have been better, but it wasn�t bad enough to make me turn down my speakers.

An Eternity in Purgatory has Never Been This Fun!

BOOH's enjoyability stems from the excellent job does as a full-fledged expansion - it's obvious that a significant amount of thought and creativity was put into this game, just like the first one.

And...much like the first one, if you find yourself looking for a game that requires thought or that involves a dynamic story line then you'd best look elsewhere. Half-Life 2, it ain't. Battle out of Hell, like it's predecessor, is strictly for those looking for a way to vent their distaste in demons and flaming children.

Allies in the After Life?

The two new multiplayer modes available in the expansion are jewels. A pretty standard capture the flag mode that pits team against team as each group of players attempts to capture the other's token skull and return it to their base. Last man standing is an interesting mode that gives each player a set amount of lives (determined by the host). Once he looses all his lives, he is forced into observer mode to wait out the rest of the game. The last player with at least one life remaining wins the battle. There's nothing like pitting it out with your buddies in the twisted world that is the after life.

We had 2 staff members give a go at BOOH, and while one of us didn't seem to have any techinical problems, the other experienced a lot of glitches. Sometimes mid-level saves would take as long as 2 minutes to load after dying, and it seemed largely unpredictable and really can ruin a game that has such a normally fast pace. Some of the environments produced slow-down no matter what graphical settings were altered (running on a GF 6800, no less!) although restarting the game seemed to help sometimes. Hopefully a patch will address these issues, but be forewarned that nothing's perfect.

Did I Mention Purgatory Being Fun?

Battle out of Hell sports great graphics, enjoyable game play, decent sound and is as fun as a barrel full of Spanish speaking monkeys (if you're into that sort of thing). Unless you have a strong distaste for violence in any shape or form, Painkiller's expansion comes with my shining stamp of approval. Fans of the original should definitely check out the expansion, and fans of mindless shooters (ala Serious Sam) should check out both.