Serious Sam & Painkiller

After playing Half-Life I wanted to hit something that was much more gameplay focused. An older style shooter that was all about running and gunning. I wanted something that came out between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 so I could get a sense of the scene going into Half-Life 2 if I decided to play that soon to get a picture of the late 90’s/early 00’s shooter scene. I also wanted the old kind of game, before Half-Life in swinging it’s giant cinematic dick around with all it’s pacing and atmosphere; so nothing like Red Faction, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex. The final requirement was that I didn’t want to play anything I was planning on playing Playstation later as I worried having the intended mouse and keyboard experience would ruin the console port for me later on. This meant Halo, and Turok were out. Oh, and like hell I was going to play a game with real guns, so Medal of Honor and Call of Duty were out to.

After looking through my steam library, I only had three that fit the bill: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Serious Sam and Painkiller. Return to Castle Wolfenstein I’m sure is nowhere near the artificial and pandery feel of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, but I wanted something with absolutely impossible weirdo guns: like the laser in Serious Sam or the stake thrower in Painkiller. I decided to go with Painkiller.

Painkiller: Black Edition

I decided I should bother to watch the first cutscene, despite the fact that I bet it looked like shit even in 2004, just so I got the full experience. I was in no way surprised by the initial story, or the writing. I remembered that it was a copy/paste of some famous comic, I just couldn’t remember which. Ghost Rider? No, the protagonist just died. The Crow? No, now he’s making a deal with the devil. To bring his wife back? That’s right, this is Spawn. Got it. Then it graciously cuts to a totally new scene: “This is it? This is the last job? Then I get to see her again?” he says, to some obviously untrustworthy servant of Belial/Mephisto/Baal/whatever-the-fuck. I appreciated that the game respected my intelligence enough to skip all the scenes where he’s introduced to the fact that is now dead, and he’s subsequently contracted by some evil for to put an uncountable number of shotgun pellets into an equally uncountable number of demons. I was not ready to sit around listening to 4-5 minutes of exposition about this particular writer’s interpretation of the eternal war between heaven and hell.

Then it just drops you into spooky gothic cemetery. Y’know, like you’re playing a shooter. I’m here to shred demon flesh and skip cutscenes. And I’m all out of cutscenes. But perhaps, I was bit too optimistic. I had heard people say this game was a progenitor to Doom: Eternal one of my favorite games of all time. I’d seen people saying it’s the great-grandfather of Doom (2016) and Doom: Eternal. Look, it’s right here:

And he isn’t alone. Lots of people in the steam reviews talk about the shared DNA. In my humble opinion, they’re all fucking liars. This game is Serious Sam, but instead of generic action hero fighting aliens, it’s generic action hero caught in a biblical war.

I internalized and accepted all of this by the time I’d killed my fifth skeleton, which was about 15 seconds into the game, and subsequently massively lowered my expectations. I’ve been here plenty of times: boot up a game that’s 20 years old that’s touted as being the best game in it’s genre, never to be topped, and it turns out to be innovative genre-piece that has aged better than most. Usually still means I’ll have a good time. And I was primed and ready after playing the Half-Life games for this to be somewhat undercooked compared to what the fanatics had to say.

It’s not fair to compare this game from 2004 made by brand new studio that probably had a dozen people working on it to the best game that came out in 2016 made by a storied studio with massive funding. But the people in the Steam reviews did it, and that annoyed me, so I’m going to do it anyway. The shooting feels nothing like Doom (2016) let alone Doom: Eternal; all the enemies slowly walked at me with complete disregard for their personal safety, just begging me to dispossess their souls from their shambling bags of bones; the area is an extremely generic graveyard setting without a hint of originality; and there was enough head bobbing I was feeling some nausea coming on before I found the setting to disable it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I read a lot of the reviews more closely and the more nuanced and reasonable people pointed out that the real DNA is that Painkiller was the first FPS to introduce optional objectives that offered permanent upgrades to your character. Or at least the first one to do it in the arcade-style shooters. Which is something I find much easier to swallow.

I say “arcade-style” because I think it’s imprecise to call Painkiller or Serious Sam boomer shooters. They are boomer shooters, true, but more specifically they’re horde shooters. Genres are weird and subjective, so take this with a grain of salt, but to me Painkiller and Serious Sam have much more in common with Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead than they do Duke Nukem or Quake. First and foremost, the levels I played in these games were brain dead simple. You don’t get a map because you don’t need one. They’re by-and-large just open arenas for you to kite enemies around in while you pump led (or stakes) into them. I never needed to collect a key to open door. Painkiller doesn’t even have a keybinding to interact with anything. If you can’t blast it open with a shotgun blast, Painkiller doesn’t care about it.

And I can respect that. Your options for braindead fun on the PC were a lot more limited in 2004. Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Runescape were the go-tos, but if you weren’t into RPGs, your best bets were online FPS matches in something like Halo, Battlefield, or Quake. So if you didn’t have a reliable internet connection, or--god forbid--were still stuck on dial-up, your only real option was replaying single-player campaigns. And Painkiller was probably a refreshing change of pace where you didn’t need to think at all. Just point and shoot; no keys, no platforming, just lead-laden bliss.

But in this modern day, when I can throw a dart at my digital library and hit three boomer shooters with 20 extra years of design lessons and new technology, I found Painkiller to be quite lacking at first. It slowly grew on me as the guns were still fun, and the enemies were just unique enough to keep me engaged. The bosses in the game were comically large. In the last level of the first chapter you’re fighting a Frankenstein-inspired brute the size of a skyscraper, which I don’t think was really popularized until God of War the following year. I slowly got used to the *Quake-*style movement that encourages you to constantly jump to maintain your speed, and even began to appreciate the simplicity of the levels.

I still only made it a 4 or 5 hours before I quit the game. I wanted to like it by the end, I really did. I saw the appeal, and I as I got more upgrades for my character I was looking forward to the higher difficulties. I wanted to see how far the game mechanics would hold up as the number of enemies grew and grew. But Painkiller has one fatal flaw that I think will forever relegate it to a cult hit, despite the resurgence of interest in boomer shooters: the secrets. In your traditional *Doom-*inspired FPS there are hidden areas in the vast majority of your maps. Places that contain ammo, medkits, hidden weapons, or any variety of different resources. The thrill of finding one of this without the aid of a guide is half of the reason I play these games. There’s an art to making a secret that’s just difficult enough to find to be rewarding, but not so difficult the player feels cheated when they give up and look it up online. Some games go as far as to take the approach that you have to abuse game mechanics to find their secrets. You have to do some crazy skill-oriented manipulation of the physics engine, or movement mechanics to reach a place a new player might think impossible. I detest these kinds of secrets. I saw several of them in some of the community made Doom (1993) content that came bundled with the latest release. I found maybe 10% of them myself, and the rest were just looking them up online and getting pissed off that some sadistic fuck hid something like that. Painkiller takes it a step farther with several of its secrets and makes them not only overly well hidden, but then proceeds to force you to try to maneuver an object into the exact position that you can jump onto it, and then do another exploit dubbed “quick-jumping” by the community to reach some ledge you have NO business being on.

I uninstalled the game when I looked up a secret and saw I needed to balance a wagon on it’s handlebar, leap on top of it, then magically climb a shear wall by spamming the space bar so fast I’d get carpal tunnel. If it was 2004, and my options were sparse, and this was a game I was replaying on and off over years, I’d probably love it. But it’s 2026, and I have over one thousand other games I want to play. I then reinstalled it the next day thinking, “I’ll just only do the secrets that aren’t fucking stupid.” But then I uninstalled it again that same level because I was wrong, I can’t do that. So the second secret that was fucking bullshit made me uninstall it again.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter

I wasn’t planning on playing both Serious Sam and Painkiller for this post, but I spent so little time with Painkiller (about 6 hours) and I thought it was an interesting coincidence the two games I had decided to choose from or so strikingly similar through no planning on my own, that I figured I could give Serious Sam a go and see if I had the same hang ups.

I had played maybe 3 hours of Serious Sam games going into this. I remembered there being this huge open fields that you would kite enemies around in, and that by the end of the game you had this ridiculous arsenal of weapons, but that was about it. The first thing I do when I start any game is turn around and try to go the opposite direction that the developers faced me. A lot of times, especially in older games, there’s an extra secret tucked away somewhere. In The First Encounter you start in this ancient egyptian temple in the middle a massive fucking desert. So when I turned around, my heart immediately sank, because off in the distance I saw a teeny tiny little oasis amid the countless sand dunes, “Oh no…” I thought, “They’re gonna make me walk all the fucking way over there…” Not a great start. I let out an already-exhausted sigh, and began my THREE MINUTE trek across the desert. At least they had the courtesy of spawning some enemies for me to shoot as I spent MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES walking back and forth across the desert.

When I got back it was a much more standard affair of looking for hidden ledges to jump onto, discolored walls to rub up against, or cracked architecture to blast open. Found all the secrets with the right amount elbow grease and was enjoying how powerful Sam’s arsenal felt. The maps were suspiciously large, even the parts that weren’t half of the goddamn Sahara. Presumably because on harder difficulties you need all that extra room to kite enemies around, but I found myself desperately wishing for a sprint key to try and find all these secrets. I understand that the devs couldn’t give you a sprint function as that would fundamentally destroy the combat of the game, which is carefully balanced around how quickly Sam can backpedal while unloading a metric ton of ammunition into a small army, but hunting for secrets is painfully slow in Serious Sam. Even if you have a guide, which I was eventually obligated to pull up because I couldn’t be bothered to leisurely stroll through Egyptian desert for minutes at a time.

Just like Painkiller, by the end of my time with Serious Sam, I desperately wanted to like the game. I get it. I get why this franchise is still going, I get how people have hundreds of hours in these relatively small games, and I get why the fanbase is pining for content. At the higher difficulties (which I briefly tried) you are partaking in this carefully choreographed dance that requires skill, reflexes, and--most of all--careful memorization. Each enemy type in the game presents a unique challenge (something I can’t say for Painkiller) that forces the player to react in a different way and have constant awareness of not only where all the enemies are surrounding the player, but also which type of enemy they are. The game might start off as simply as “run backwards; pull trigger” but as you progress you need to know the best way to handle the more immediate threat of the charging pulls while still keeping in my behavior of the long-range missiles of the bipedal cyborg mechs. I imagine once you put in the time to internalize the enemy patterns and behaviors it can feel immensely rewarding, and is still a unique experience 20 years later.

You’ll remember I said that I wanted to like this game, not that I actually did. Even as I write this I feel an urge bubbling up to download it one more time and try it again, this time on a higher difficulty. But I am stopped by the knowledge that a higher difficulty means a fresh playthrough, and a fresh playthrough means spending another SIX GODDAMN MINUTES running across the desert to get that first secret. Perhaps one day I’ll see someone upload a video essay on YouTube exposing their cherished childhood memories of a late night pushing through the highest difficulty in The Second Encounter and I’ll feel the pull of the game again, and I’ll have forgotten how fucking stupid that oasis secret is, and I’ll be able to click with this game. But I know that it will be many years before I forget the bad actors in the Steam reviews that tried to convince me Painkiller (2004) was comparable to Doom: Eternal.

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