It doesn’t get more niche than a cult favorite shooter where you serve the Lord by following the commands of Samael, smashing your way through corrupted nuns, evil preachers, and doleing out justice to demons. While this franchise had five entries, it never truly caught on with the masses, and thus became an underground favorite for PC gamers. I remember a whole bunch of hours of playing multiplayer sessions with instagib stake gun battles, so when I heard that Painkiller was making a surprise return after a long hiatus I was cautiously optimistic. I even remember meeting a few of the team from Anshar at PAX West and telling them that I was extremely cautious hearing they were planning to resurrect it, because it managed to be so similiar but so unique when compared to its counterparts from ID Software. Was Anshar Studios successful at bringing an iconic franchise back to life? Find out in our Painkiller review!
Painkiller
Developer: Anshar Studios
Publisher: 3D Realms
Platforms: Windows PC (Reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X
Release Date: October 21, 2025
Price: $39.99
On the surface, People Can Fly’s Painkiller presented itself a lot like DOOM or Quake, but in execution played a lot more like Serious Sam. This meant that while you’d seemingly be presented with very little story and a whole bunch of horde slaying goodness, Painkiller originally had a surprisingly in-depth story. The original game told the tale of a guy named Daniel who took his wife out to dinner and they were killed in a car crash on the way home. While his wife went to Heaven, Daniel was trapped in purgatory and the Angel Samael informs him that he’ll need to kill four generals of Lucifer’s army in order to be purified so that he can make it to the penthouse.
Anshar’s version of Painkiller is absolutely soulless. This tale sees four hunters killing demons because Metatron tells them to in order to get a chance at redemption. There’s some semblance of story here, but it’s buried in codex entries that are less than interesting to read. The meat and potatoes of this game is the forced three player co-op, as you must play with two other demon hunters to run and gun through levels. It looks great and it plays fast and smooth, in fact it would probably run well even on older hardware, but would you even want to bother? Truthfully, this thing reeks of “hey, can we make a game with that old franchise you guys own the rights for?”.
Sure, there’s returning elements so the name makes sense. The stake gun and electro driver return, alongside the Painkiller itself, but it’s now been reduced to supplemental fodder, exactly like the chainsaw in DOOM 2016. In fact, this game apes DOOM and DOOM Eternal so hard that there’s zero doubts on what they were trying to accomplish. Sure, the guns look and feel pretty good, but as each of the biomes revolve around one core gameplay mechanic, everything you do feels like it’s the same thing in every stage.
In one biome you’ll be forced into checkpoints that are locked off until you grab a barrel and fill it full of souls before sticking it in the mechanism on the wall to unlock the room and progress forward. In another, you’ll have to keep retrieving soul lanterns that you’ll have to throw into a bubble in order to power devices to keep them moving along the pre-defined path. Babysitting a payload has its perks in a PVP game, but it’s the antithesis of fun in a PVE game. It’s tedious and unfun, mainly because one person of your three person team has to essentially break off to do the objective while the others can run around and mercilessly destroy everything all willy-nilly.
The worst part about this is that if you can even manage to find other players online to play with, they will often ignore the objective until one person gets frustrated and picks it up. If you play solo, the bots can be commanded to do things but it’s flaky at best, so you’re still the one running all the mechanics to progress. There’s some hidden treasures and stuff too, but exploration is also pretty annoying because instead of just allowing players to do a wall jump, instead you pivot in one direction when you bounce off a wall meaning that unless you position yourself just right, you’ll miss your mark or outright fall into the abyss and lose a fat chunk of health.
Speaking of the bots, the game is trivial on any difficulty other than the highest, and while that could be fun, the bot partners are either pro level or absolutely braindead depending on what logic loads in. If you get lucky and they load in smart, they will hard carry you so long as you don’t die three times. If they load in stupid, you might as well just restart the level cause they won’t defend you from anything and they’ll be constantly dead. On top of this, the voice acting is terrible and it’s full of max-level cringe Marvel style quips with generic metal instrumentals playing in the background that sound like they were generated by AI as there’s nothing of note. I pretty much killed the sound after about three hours of gameplay cause I’d rather just listen to my own music.
Once you get past all of the bad, there’s still two even worse things to discuss. For whatever reason, they added a Tarot card system that allows you to spend the gold you earn in game to buy “lottery” cards which lets you choose from three different cards at random. You can equip two of these cards for each run that are consumed after each run, which is supposed to be the hook to keep you playing, but after you unlock all of the cards, why bother? Sure, the bonuses can be nice, but it’s tedious to buy lottery draws over and over hoping for the cards you want. It doesn’t take too long to unlock all of the weapons and weapon upgrades (since these are unlocked with Ancient Souls earned from playing levels) if you ignore the Tarot cards, so it’s even easier to continue to ignore the Tarot cards and keep playing as you want, without ever bothering. The double gold one is pretty much the only card I ever used and it was just to help me unlock everything quicker.
The other game mode that’s here for some reason called Rogue Angel, which is, as you guessed, a roguelike mode. This mode lets you progress through seven different areas and it’s yet another unfun addition that no one asked for. Add everything up and include a season pass that you probably won’t care enough to finish if you buy it and you’ll find that Painkiller 2025 is literally just an attempt to cash in on a franchise that’s been stuck in limbo for no other reason than to hopefully make a few bucks on an established name. Perhaps if there’s a true single player mode added the decent at best gameplay loop might be enough to hook players for a few moments, but in its current state, you’re better off playing any other three player shooter, like Abyssus. Bonus points: Play it while listening to a playlist compromised of songs named Painkiller, or one of the many covers of the legendary Judas Priest track.
Painkiller was reviewed on Steam using a code provided by 3D Realms. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Painkiller is now available for Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
