Calling you out, Son of Stone.ĭeveloper: Acclaim Austin (aka Iguana Studios) Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion Notice the lack of Dinosaurs on this box art. Just skip every single cutscene in Outriders. I don’t think I’d ever recommend any of their games without caveats, but by golly they’re going for it in that delightful Eurojank way. There’s a similar manic energy to all of their games, and some of the goofy, physics-inclined nonsense from this was directly codified with Bulletstorm’s stylish kills interactions. I think the highest compliment I can give Painkiller (or at least the first “episode” of Painkiller, which is what I played on stream) is that I can see how People Can Fly got to Bulletstorm, Gears Judgment and Outriders from it. Honestly was having an alright time until I ran into the first boss encounter, spent multiple attempts dumping ammo in it for minutes at a time only to more-or-less get one shot by one of its wide, sweeping attacks. It also has some, uh, decidedly broken-ass physics interactions and weapons (if you enjoy pinning enemies to the wall, may I recommend the stake launcher) and once-per-level power ups in the form of Tarot cards.
It’s not as intent on having you run away from screaming, headless bomb men, but it’s about on that level of goofy and mindless, more a test of raw reflex and crowd management skills than any sort of mechanically complex endeavor. Are you a bad enough dude to strafe around a literal arena-shaped environment shooting (at least in the first episode) a bunch of evil monks and demons and skeletons with a shotgun? Sure you are. Similar to Serious Sam, Painkiller explains itself fairly quickly and lets you know up front exactly how dumb it is. That’s not an especially high compliment, but on the other hand it’s definitely not the worst thing I’ve played for this feature by a long shot. For what it’s worth, I think I like Painkiller slightly more. Okay, admittedly, when I call this a countertrend I’m mostly talking about the surprise success of Croteam’s Serious Sam games, which I have been on record as not particularly liking. Namely, by putting you in a big arena of dudes and asking you to strafe and/or bunny hop your way around them. Would I play more? Sure? Listen man he's bootleg Frank Castle fighting a bunch of doofy looking monsters in a variety of doofy environments.Īs shooters started to drift away from the high-speed stylings of Quake and Friends during the mid 00s, there was definitely a countertrend of even more stripped down, even faster games that took the “Arena Shooter” moniker seriously.
If anything it made my arm hurt more than it usually does playing games like this.
Troubleshooting: one unofficial fan patch