Painkiller Demo... anyone else playing? (1 Viewer)

[Gregg Shiu]

I've been tracking this since the guys over at PA mentioned it a long while ago. The download just became available today, wondering what anybody else's thoughts are on it. So far, I'm really astonished by the gameplay. Really inventive weapons, but I'm thinking it's not as frantic as it'll be when the final version comes out. I love the physics, enemy detail, and overall atmosphere, but I can't help feeling that I'm gonna have to upgrade my Gforce4 4400 and low-end Athlon XP sometime.

 

[BrianShort]

I was thinking about downloading this today. I've heard the physics are pretty fun to play with. But with your comment about your GeForce 4... I'm wondering if I should bother since I only have a GeForce 2 GTS, with an Athlon XP 1700+ and 256 megs of ram.

I will eventually upgrade when HL2 comes out (or Doom 3, whichever is first) to at least a Radeon 9600 Pro or equivalent, and at least double my ram. I might upgrade the cpu to an Athlon XP 2600+... that's as high as my motherboard will support.

Brian

 

[Gregg Shiu]

I think you'll be able to run it but just barely. I managed to play this on a system with identical specs to yours, with the exception of a GeForce 3 instead of 2. Hope that helps.

 

[BrianShort]

The first couple levels actually run pretty well, except for the occational pause. The real problem is the demo boss level. My PC doesn't like that very much

Brian

 

[Kyle McKnight]

I'm gonna need to upgrade my video card to play this one.

 

[Krystian C]

This game is great, the ragdoll physics on the enemies is really cool. Very sweet staking them to the wall. May have to pick this up when it comes out.

 

[KevinRB]

I just tried the Painkiller demo. It's not revolutionary, but it is very cool. The environments and enemies are great, and I love the ragdoll physics. It has a very creepy feel to it, similar to Clive Barker's Undying.

I have an Athlon 2700 with a GeForce 2, and it struggled at points. I generally had to keep it at 800x600, with a few of the graphic options turned down. When it came to views with far vanishing points, it really chugged. Then it crashed with a clipping bug on the second level.

Anyone know how many levels there are in the demo?

 

[Gregg Shiu]

Three levels.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

I played thru the first level and it definately did bottleneck my Ti4200 toward the end when all the massive enemies and bosses are on the screen, overall not bad. Only problem is there does not seem to be a game save so you cannot save your progress in the demo.. or a game load for that matter.

 

[Aaron Cooke]

i've got a P4 2.8 and 9800 Pro and was running it with everything maxed out but getting some lag in the monster intensive places so i kicked it back down to 1280x???(can't remember the rez) and it runs great. I'm new to PC gaming but the graphics are amazing and i think it's pretty fun to play. I got past the first level on daydream but haven't quite made it on insomnia yet.

 

[Shawn Shultzaberger]

I'm running an Athlon XP1700+, 512Mb memory, WD 80Gb drive with 8Mb buffer and 128MB ATI Radeon 9200. I had no problems running everything maxed at 1024x768. No lag, no stumbles. I'm quite surprised at how well it runs on my system yet Far Cry won't run at all.

I like this game. Kinda creepy and again the rag doll physics are cool. I may have to pick this up as an interim game to HL2.

 

[BrianShort]

Shawn: By not run at all... do you mean that literally, in that it won't even load?

 

[Shawn Shultzaberger]

Doh! I guess I should have elaborated a little.

The game loads and I can go in make changes to the settings/options. But when it goes to start loading the playable part my screen starts flashing in synch with the "loading bar". After that it just drops to desk top. But if I turn all the video settings down to minimal I can get the game to load and "almost" play. The frame rate is probably around 1 or 2 and the colors are all wacked. Even at that point it's not playable. I have the latest drivers for video and motherboard so I just assumed it was a real hog and my lowly little system couldn't run it. I double checked my directX 9 with dxdiag and it all checked good. I also made sure nothing was loaded into memory other than what is needed for the operating system.

So best I can figure is I have a conflict with one of my drivers or my system isn't up to par for this game (Far Cry).

 

[BrianShort]

As some one with the same CPU, about to upgrade to a 9800 Pro... that sort of worries me, but I doubt it's a hardware issue. Have you tried reverting to some older video card drivers?

I'm also considering a motherboard switch to a P4 3ghz.

Brian

 

[Rob Speicher]

I have an Athlon XP 2200+ and a GeForce4 Ti4400 and the only slow down in 1024x768 is when I shoot off all the fireworks in the room on the second demo level.

 

[Larry Talbot]

Ancient athlon one gig here with Geforce4 Ti4600 and 512 meg PC100 ram and the game runs okay at 1024 with most details set to max (shadows off, I think). Definite slowdown at times but one nice thing about this game is that it does just that - slows down. Instead of a clipped frame rate, you get a kind of bullet time effect almost. No stuttering, which I appreciate. Still, though I really wanted to like the game (huge fan of the original Blood, as well as Quake) I found it to be a little boring. Kill one of the rotting zombies and you've killed them all, even if they do collapse differently thanks to the nifty Havoc engine. And the spooky atmosphere takes a serious dive in the second level, with the goofy looking Knights/Ninjas? running about...Might check this out on the Xbox for co-op play though.

 

[Aaron Cooke]

can anyone tell me how you kill the 4 armor plated dudes with glowing eyes on the second level. I cleared the level of everything else last night but i could not figure out how to take those 4 down. There was a glowing thing on top of a pillar but i didn't know how to get to it.