PAINKILLER

The stake and chips of first-person shooters still provides a hearty meal.

- 

It's fair to say 2004 was the year first-person shooters reached the zenith of their ambition and cultural significance. It glimpsed the future of the FPS in Far Cry, heralded the return of the genre's grandaddy in Doom 3, and saw the pinnacle of the form in Half-Life 2. But it also brought us the world's first retro-shooter in Painkiller, the debut title from Polish studio People Can Fly.

At least, that's how press coverage from the time angled it. In its review, PCG's now-defunct rival PC Zone described Painkiller as "a no nonsense run-and-gun blaster that takes its inspiration from classics like Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem". At a time when the FPS was incorporating cinematic set-pieces and narrative storytelling, Painkiller's straightforward gunplay seemed like a throwback to a simpler era.

In hindsight, Painkiller has little in common with the mazey shooting galleries of the '90s, and is in many ways as contemporary as the more celebrated titles from the shooter's vintage year. It just has different priorities. Where Far Cry took the FPS into the open world, and Half-Life 2 broke new ground melding gunplay with storytelling, Painkiller sought to be the last word in aero-gib-namics.

There is one commonality Painkiller shares with the shooters of yore, namely its disdain for plot. Your character, Daniel Garner, is a chin clad in a leather jacket who becomes trapped in Purgatory following a car crash that kills him and his wife. Daniel can only join his dead spouse in heaven if he kills four of Lucifer's generals, who just so happen to be planning an assault on the No Man's Land of the afterlife. Between Daniel and these demonic masterminds are hordes of undead minions, which you'll be blasting nonstop for the next ten hours.