For some reason I’ve yet to discover, I found myself playing level five of the Painkiller expansion, Battle Out of Hell, after completing the first three levels. The fourth level is apparently not accessible at the Insomnia difficulty level.
Anyway, the fifth level, Dead City, is an expansive one set in an abandoned city. There are zombies and mutant dragonflies lurking and waiting, but the Panzer Spiders are the most likely reason for the city’s abandonment. The latter are mechanical creatures so huge and powerful they can send you flying in the air by merely stamping their forelegs.
The action takes place on the city streets, in a multi-level carpark, a mall and a parking area before ending with a battle in a tunnel. The combination of the realistic environments and the supernatural creatures makes Dead City a very satisfying level to play through.
There were a few annoyances, though. There was a jumping section which irritated me as usual but the really annoying part featured a tricky pair of corpulent creatures. They had a nasty habit of hurling cars and vans at you to deadly effect and more importantly, seemed completely invulnerable. It took several cycles of dying and reloading before I worked out the key to defeating them and typical of FPS games, and Painkiller in particular, the trick doesn’t quite make sense.
I can appreciate a challenge and I can appreciate the designers wanting the player think problems through but it always annoys me when puzzles in games have unreasonable or senseless solutions. Boss battles are the worst offenders, of course, and Painkiller’s final boss was probably the worst offender of them all.
