Just finished this game today on "Insomnia" difficulty.

It's odd: I can't quite place whether I like this game or not: it's just too inconsistent. One minute I'm having the time of my life blasting away the undead, nailing them to walls with my trust stake gun and the next I'm cursing godawful level design that makes me want to break stuff in fury. The end of chapter bosses, for one, are spectacular but frustratingly crap.

Painkiller looks consistently GREAT though and the Havok physics is often hilarious (zombie crawls towards me, I shoot out balcony supports above it, balcony hits zombie over head). The final level in particular - "Hell" - looks spectacular: a series of desolate scenes of war throughout the ages, culminating in a ruined city caught in the middle of an atomic bomb explosion - all frozen in time, with shrapnel caught in mid-flight, explosions frozen in the air and everything around you poised to collapse in on itself under the shadow of a giant mushroom cloud. As you round a corner and fall into a WWI trench, looking up into the ravanged sky a single thought crosses your mind: "Wow. War really is Hell."

While the story is crap, the final level is spectacular enough to almost suggest the developers are trying to make some sort of statement, as are some of the enemies (WWI zombie soldiers clad in gas masks with shell holes through their chests etc.).

Painkiller even briefly indulges my other great love: the surreal and mildly humerous. There's a strangely disturbing level set in a military base, the distorted echoes of radio transmissions years old ringing in your ears. Almost unintelligible but definetly panicky. As you reach the end of the level, you stagger into a hanger containing... a UFO! "Surprise!" you think, with some level of sarcasm. You're then somewhat amused - and a little confused too - to note that if you look carefully, there's a red hammer and sickle stamped on it in places and - if you listen carefully enough over the ambient music - the strains of the Russian national anthem are being played out the bottom of it. Hrm.

It's BUGGY too: my Radeon 8500 kept resetting (freeze, black screen, back to normal) at random in areas and sometimes I got bad polygon flicker and even once it managed to chop up the ambient sound. Erk.

In all, a game that manages to be great and simultaneously crap (no co-operative play!) at the same time. What the f*ck?

Anyone else played it? I'm now giving it another go on "Nightmare" difficulty, just to play a couple of extra levels available only on hard.

Yeah, the demo pretty much sold me too. If you get the game, there's one level that should be consigned to the very bowels of videogaming Hell: it's called Snowy Bridge. It's a bridge and it's snowy.

There are hundreds of ninjas racing towards you, you slip and slide around and the likelyhood of you dying within about two minutes of actually setting foot on the bridge itself is stupidly high. This is the game's LOWEST point. High points include Hell itself (somewhat ironic), the Opera House, an abandoned gothic town (the one in the demo) and a frozen castle. In the cutscenes, I'm fairly sure the main character is voiced by none other than Cam Clarke, the guy who's also the voice of Liquid Snake: extra coolness.