saatana on 3/3/2009 at 13:49

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Yeah. Shitty performance for such a bad looking game. Kept freezing for a few seconds regularly until it froze for good about 40 minutes in. The jumping was the buggiest I've ever seen in any fps. Could be fun, but at the moment it's far away from Painkillers fluidity.

Edit: reaplayed it today and it ran a lot smoother with no freezes somehow.

Xenith on 15/3/2009 at 10:50

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So I got the game myself and right now I think I'm almost at the end of it (I stopped caring about level number somewhere after 4, because it just got boring).

The way this game is optimized is truly a crime. It seems to me that the more you play the more data gets chunked up in the physical memory and too little of it is taken out. This ends up with silly situations where you have to save and restart the game only to be able to look at more than 5 polygons at the same time and not get 1 fps or a comeplete freeze. I haven't seen anything like this since Gothic 2 which did somewhat the same thing, but it being less detailed it wasn't much of a problem until you played somewhere around 5 hours.

The gameplay got old after the first 2 levels and the addition of the [spoiler]necromancer sentient claw[/spoiler] only made it fun for about 10 more minutes. So far it feels like a combination of Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Jericho.

The storyline and voice acting and plot... well... nobody can really talk about that. I'm a bit dissapointed because what was going to make this game great was the gameplay. Unfortunately I can't seem to understand why there are even combos if there really aren't any special moves involved just a matter of swinging a shovel first and kicking afterwards or viceversa. Sure I get adrenaline for that, but the point is to have fun while getting it. Sometimes the monsters don't even seem to react to what I hit them with, unless I aim at them in certain ways (when they're getting up from the ground for example).

Also, I'm playing on normal and I just don't get the need to shoot an unarmored soldier 4 or 5 times until he's finally down (talking about the still human ones).

Paz on 15/3/2009 at 15:04

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I didn't really meet any of those technical problems (save for the 'sometimes melee attacks don't seem to connect as well as they should' thing), but welp. Obviously they're happening to some people, so that's not too great - hopefully those issues will be fixed. I think the patch for the Russian version is out, so an English-language one is presumably not far off.

I've finished it now and thought it was pretty terrific (except level 11 which was a boring slogfest against mainly one type of monster). The plot and dialogue are clearly ludicrous, but it had enough in the 'freezing people then kicking them so they shatter' type department to keep me plenty interested.

That said, I missed out on a lot of the 'golden age' of mindless FPS titles so maybe I'd have been less impressed had I played more of those.