Painkiller is coming out early next month and it's time to take a closer look than we already have here at GameShark (check the bottom of the page for additional Painkiller related features). I've had the pleasure of playing a build of this promising first-person shooter from People Can Fly and DreamCatcher Games for several months and I can honestly tell all those folks that have watched the movies and looked closely at every released screenshot that Painkiller is looking very promising.

Painkiller is all about straightforward action, in the same vein as games like Doom and Serious Sam; Painkiller takes a dark and gritty environment and tosses you head first into it with an assortment of cool to fantastic weapons (I love the stake gun the best) and then throws an enormous amount of enemies at you. The rest of it is all up to you.

People Can Fly's game offers a powerful physics system, an arsenal of cool gadgets and a number of unique player powers tossed into a blender and thrown into a world of darkness, destruction and evil. The most powerful visual thing about the game is the physics - the game uses the Havok physics engine in an impressive way, allowing players to make things explode, send debris flying, knock enemies backwards violently, pin enemies to walls, and break objects and parts of the environment with some interesting results.

The little touches with the physics engine also go along way - shoot a hanging corpse and it swings back and forth in wildly; put a stake in a wagon or shoot a grenade stake at it and watch it roll away or tip over. But the most satisfying thing about the use of the Havok physics engine is how violent it makes the gameplay overall - there's nothing cooler than shooting an enemy and watching it fly backwards like a ragdoll, hitting a tombstone or a wall with a sickening thud - or flying right over it and off the screen..

The graphics are crisp, and the engine is pretty stable at high resolutions provided that you have a fairly beefy machine. Since I don't have a lower-end PC to test it on, I can't say for certain how stable it will be, but on my P4 2.4 GHz machine it runs as smooth as silk - even with a lot going on. The pace of the game is also fast and movement is as smooth as a freshly polished skull. The bosses, mid level heavies and cannon fodder that populates the levels we played were also well done and varied.