I don't know what to say about this game.

To start with, it's yet another game whose lineage has created
expectation that hasn't been met. It's better than Overdose in
concept, but fails in major ways in application.

The biggest mistake was putting the production and QA in the seemingly
unsupervised hands of "Homegrown". The same people made the Overdose
chapter, but the quality and production values of that game are light
years ahead of those found in Resurrection. We've ended up with a much
better game on paper, but a dreadful end product in reality.

Painkiller: Resurrection is almost as bad from a quality point of view
as Robert D Anderson and the Legacy of Cthulhu. Even by my own
admittedly low standards, that was an unbelievably awful game that
should have been free to download and held up as an example of how not
to make a game.

The one redeeming thing about Resurrection is that it is undeniably
Painkiller at heart. Whereas Homegrown could have called Overdose
something completely unrelated to Painkiller (and probably should have
done so) and few would have questioned that move, Resurrection cannot
deny its PK roots.

It seems as if Homegrown were just left to their own devices with this
game. To start with, an old beta demo was released in error. That was
embarrassing enough. To cap it off, the final release is so buggy that
it's unplayable for most people. There are numerous game crashing bugs
and masses of graphical glitches. The AI path finding is laughably
poor with enemies frequently getting stuck in parts of the
environment. I cringe at the amateurish feel this lends to the overall
gameplay.

Worst of all, the much vaunted co-op mode has turned out to be a
complete con. A lot of people were excited by the thought of playing
through this new campaign with friends. The reality is that "co-op" in
this game consists of unrelated multiplayer maps populated by bots.
You just clear a map of monsters and that's it.

This game is a mess. Yet you can see the PK in it just waiting to
burst out. The game will get patched, but the damage is already done.
As it is, the engine is decidedly aged looking, despite some nice but
highly superficial improvements.

If the game had not been so horribly buggy and the co-op had actually
been co-op, the lack of high quality graphics might have become a
minor gripe. As it stands, Resurrection is every bit as poor as Robert
D Anderson, which is a crying shame, given its high quality lineage.

I must admit that at the very least I expected a game that was well
written on the technical front; my worries were more about the
gameplay. Unfortunately, it sounds as if not only isn;t the game fun
to play, it also suffers from poor quality control (all the more
disappointing since its engine isn't up to par either).

The Painkiller series was never on my list of most highly-regarded
games -I found the gameplay a bit too shallow for my taste- but the
original titles had an unremitting style that was hard to deny and as
such I was hoping -despite my worries- to enjoy Resurrection. Now, it
sounds like I'm better off skipping it entirely.

IGN has published its review of Painkiller: Resurrection. It has
labeled it as the worst game of 2009 and given it a feeble 2.6 out of
10.

I wish I could find something in their review that I disagree with,
but I really can't. Not even the cross reference to "You Are Empty".

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/104/1043357p1.html

I always have a hard time following the comments on this series in
csipga.  From the start and increasingly as I played into the
Painkiller series I couldn't get anything past a "doom dumbed down"
feeling.  "dumbed down" as in reduced to a few simple icons and
elementary SP FX.

Does the Painkiller series even have a character?
Like Jack in Farcry, and JC Denton and Gordon Freeman and others.

I suppose you could call it "Doom dumbed down"; fans of the series
would call it "classic gameplay", unencumbered with such unnecessaries
as use keys, interactive environments or talkative NPCs. The range of
activities in this game is limited: you pick up guns and ammo, and
then you use them to shoot the hordes of bad-guys who make a bee-line
for your position. This is a purposeful game-design decision, not one
that is a result of lack of talent or money. Undeniably the gameplay
is shallow when compared to more complex FPS games like Half Life or
Deus Ex, but that's the whole point.

This sort of gameplay is not everybody's cup of tea; in truth, it
isn't something I get that much enjoyment from either (I like to have
reason for and progression to all my gunplay) but I can understand its
appeal. I also can appreciate the skill the (original) developers
showed in the first game; the levels -although eclectic and
unconnected in style- offer well-paced and balanced non-stop action.
Its graphics are starting to age now, but at the time they were very
competitive with other titles and its immense bosses were a
spectacular challenge.

Painkiller is not everybody's cup of tea but I think "dumbed down" is
an unfair label; it is unarguably simpler but simple isn't a bad thing
and achieving it isn't always as easy as it might seem... especially
if you also want it to be fun.