Is 'Painkiller:Overdose' A Good Fix, Or Is It Too Much? [REVIEW]

Painkiller:Overdose is a stand-alone expansion pack for the first-person shooter Painkiller, developed by Mindware Studios, who made the god-awful Dreamkiller, and Cold War. It started out as a fan-made game mod, but Dreamcatcher, the publisher of the original Painkiller granted the project full financial and technical support.
In Painkiller:Overdose players take the role of Belial, a wise-cracking half angel, half demon who gets his wings ripped off and sent to hell-prison. You quickly escape, and I mean quickly because this is all told to you in the first three minute cut-scene, and take off on your revenge trip. The story is only told to you in four cut-scenes, which are mostly just to show you how well you killed each boss, with the levels you go through adding absolutely nothing to the story.
Each level in the story is set in a different location, which in regard to the story makes no sense. You start out in a cataclysm, make your way to a Japanese village, a nuclear power plant, even an amusement park. In regards to the story, it just makes no sense why your sent there. Each level is designed in a series of rooms where enemies will start to spawn, once they are are dead a checkpoint pops up that fills your health, and you make your way through the next room. Having your levels designed this way really takes away any real difficulty from the levels, if you die you just start at the beginning of the room you died in. The one part that the levels do shine on though is the creature design, each level introduces new enemies, and they all look awesome, from mutant clowns, to cardboard cutouts of Nosferatu.
As with most games in the FPS genre, your given a wide selection of weapons, from a severed head that shoots a laser beam, a knife that shoots crystals, and even a gun that shoots balls of green goo, but it never felt like you had enough ammo for any of the guns. In a game where all you need to do is center the screen on what you want to kill and pull the trigger, ammo should be more plentiful. Once an enemy is dead, it will drop a soul, if you collect sixty-six of them you get to enter a super-powered mode, where you can kill everything with just one click.
The sound design is almost as bad as the game’s textures, bland for the most part, and just plain terrible at others. Your character likes to spit out terrible one liners, alone the lines of ” Kiss my half angel ass”, and the lovely ” I love the taste of evil souls in the morning”. These lines would be alright, and even worth a little chuckle, if they weren’t repeated constantly, over the course of the games seventeen levels.
Over-all it’s hard to see why Dreamcatcher decided this was worth throwing money at, and it’s harder still to see why anyone would want to play it. The original is much better, and at the same price it’s just a better purchase. Stay far away from Painkiller:Overdose.
Title: Painkiller Overdose
Genre: Action
Developer: Mindware Studios
Publisher: Nordic Games
Release Date: 30 Oct 2007