First-person shooters started with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. Hordes of enemies came at you from every direction and you fended them off in an adrenaline panic. Then the technology kind of went to rendering one or two monsters at a time with incredibly detailed shadows. And that’s all right, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

But then, a revival happened! Developer People Can Fly dusted off Serious Sam’s frantic action feeling, mixed it with a physics engine so you could blast your way through ghouls in style, then went back in time to release Painkiller before DOOM 3 even came out to preemptively take the genre back to its roots.

I never played Painkiller before this weekend, save a demo trial on a friend’s computer. I just didn’t have the hardware in 2004 to run it. So when I got the shooter itch, I downloaded the game from Steam, and found that it holds up quite well by today’s standards.

Painkiller’s defining characteristic is that it demands things be awesome at all times. Where another game might give you a rifle, Painkiller gives you a gun that launches giant stakes that send enemies flying through the air like ragdolls and nails them to structures, and it also shoots grenades from the underside, AND you can spear the grenades in midair with the stakes to send them whistling on their merry way for an improvised RPG. (There’s also the now-famous shurikens-and-lightning gun but trust me, the stakes are the real star of the show here.

The game grudgingly caves to tradition by having one big enemy as a boss instead of the usual mops of little guys, but makes up for it by making them ungodly huge, resulting in much the same “you’ve got to be kidding me” sensation.

Complaints? Eh, I’ve got a couple of obligatory ones. The sound is a little chintzy in places. That first boss has some totally cheap attacks like the whirlwind that removes control of your character, always an irritation in an action game. Some of the levels are pretty brown. One of the minibosses was an annoying puzzle battle that I had to look online to see how to beat. And that’s IT, really, because Painkiller is so unapologetically awesome in every other respect that it’s entirely worth the ten dollars you’ll pay for it.

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