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- Alternative Character Interpretation: Apparently, Belial is a half-angel/half-demon who likes to wisecrack at his enemies.
- Awesome Music: Oh very much, the only thing to make it more metal was to add the Judas Priest song of the same name.
- Anti-Climax Boss: Once you realize what you're supposed to do to kill him, Lucifer turns out to be a pathetically easy Puzzle Boss who can be killed in just a few seconds.
- Glass Cannon: Despite being killable in just a few seconds with just 2 shots, Lucifer's attacks do massive damage and he can kill you in just a couple hits if you don't know what you're supposed to do to harm him.
- Catharsis Factor: As Yahtzee said, "the best way to blow off steam is to blow off someone's nadgers".
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: In the last boss fight, you fight Lucifer in the middle of a NUCLEAR EXPLOSION.
- Demonic Spiders: Two most notable examples: the electricians in the Studios level from Overdose. Skulls (skull-headed punks with shotguns) from the original game are also very painful to deal with.
- Make that three, with the voodoo priests in the penultimate level of Battle Out of Hell being worse since they're unfreezable. That, and the voodoo priests have an unavoidable attack in the form of damaging you via their voodoo dolls.
- First Installment Wins: The first game is by far the most respected by fans and critics.The first expansion got a lukewarm reception, and everything else is considered to have chronic sequelitis.
- Game-Breaker: With the right combination of cards, you can have the approximate equivalent of a Demon Morph at your disposal, to be used whenever you need. Three times.
- It gets better: in Battle out of Hell, with the right combination of cards, you can have the actual demon morph on steroids whenever you need it. Three times.
- One of the Tarot cards in Painkiller: Black Edition lets you enter demon mode every 50 souls instead of every 66. Seeing how there's around a 100 enemies every level it's a lot easier to fight large battles.
- Goddamned Bats: Bones (three-foot-tall, armless skeletons) are fast, hard to hit, and leech souls from your Demon Morph bar when they get close.
- Goddamned Boss: Lucifer isn't very dangerous, but he's a very odd Puzzle Boss who you first have to get into "demon morph" form by killing 66 monsters, at which point you have about 30 seconds to beat him. The fight with him is very much an Unexpected Gameplay Change: not only does he have no health bar, it's really hard to figure out what the hell to even do You're supposed to press the fire key to push the meteors that fall from the sky into him, but this is both counter-intuitive, and the only time you can tell it's doing anything is if he falls to his knees or just falls over dead (as he only has 200 hp, but it's really hard to tell when you're actually damaging him. If you take too long, you go out of demon mode and have to kill another 66 people to get another try, meaning it's best to just save right before getting 66 kills and reload if you fail.
- It's Short, So It Sucks!: Resurrection: Six levels for thirty dollars does not make a good value.
- Hell & Damnation effectively cuts half of the original game's levels. The fact that the levels were cut in order to sell them as DLC made a lot of people angry.
- Iron Woobie: Daniel. Oh, sweet merciful lord, Daniel. Poor guy can NOT catch a break.
- Most Wonderful Sound: Every single time the exit portal opens at the end of each level.
- The shotgun is one of the most satisfying weapons to use for the sound alone.
- Narm:
- The opening cinematic and the cruel irony of Catherine mentioning that the day is her birthday right before she dies in a freak car accident.
- Daniel's reaction
to Eve's soul being taken by Death.
- Nightmare Fuel: The aforementioned Asylum and Orphanage. We cannot stress this enough. It's like Shalebridge Cradle lite.
- To give you a good idea about how frakking scary the Asylum is, one half of the enemies are zombies without hands or feet that leap at you from across the room if you don't kill them fast enough, the other half are giant, screaming, glowing Frankenstein things that pop out randomly from doorways and rooms, and an extra 1% are ghosts that phase in and out of walls at random and are invincible. Keep in mind the level's challenge is to only use the Painkiller, either forcing you to launch it and lose any melee options for a good amount of time or charging up and slicing said horrifying monstrosities up...for a better idea see these two videos.
- Those Frankenstein things are actually straitjacketed patients undergoing pretty extreme electric shock therapy. And the noise they make is muffled screaming. Yeah.
- To give you a good idea about how frakking scary the Asylum is, one half of the enemies are zombies without hands or feet that leap at you from across the room if you don't kill them fast enough, the other half are giant, screaming, glowing Frankenstein things that pop out randomly from doorways and rooms, and an extra 1% are ghosts that phase in and out of walls at random and are invincible. Keep in mind the level's challenge is to only use the Painkiller, either forcing you to launch it and lose any melee options for a good amount of time or charging up and slicing said horrifying monstrosities up...for a better idea see these
- Nightmare Retardant:
- Animal Farm in Overdose. So it's a creepy farm-cum-slaughterhouse, sure... but then you're attacked by suicide-bombing demon chickens, cyborg cows in bondage gear, reanimated butchers with sawblades and cow heads hanging on their neck, and find bloody scribbles on the walls reading "please i'll be a vegetarian" and "i'll join PETA"... and THEN the level segues into a fast food restaurant named Last Food with a host of clowns attacking you. And this was supposed to be scary?
- To a lesser extent, Looney Park in Battle Out Of Hell. It has the same ridiculous clowns as Animal Farm (though the change of setting makes them less ridiculous), and the overly "gruesome" amusement park rides are too audacious to be scary. The poisonous human-popcorn hybrid monsters and tedious Tarot Card challenge don't help.
- Animal Farm
- Scrappy Mechanic: One thing that almost everyone agrees on is that it takes way too long for souls to emerge from the corpses of slain enemies, and if you don't collect them, they disperse way too quickly, meaning a lot of time spent sitting around the cooling corpse, twiddling your thumbs while you wait for the soul to appear.
- Sequel Difficulty Spike: Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is noticeably harder than the original game, especially the earlier levels. There are even more enemies, and the earlier levels now contain Elite Mooks instead of simply waves of cannon fodder.
- Sequelitis: Everything after Battle out of Hell is widely seen as terrible. While Hell & Damnation, is generally considered better than the post-Battle out of Hell games, a lot of people were miffed by the developers cutting out half of the original game's levels and selling them as DLC.
- So Okay, It's Average: There's nothing really wrong with Battle out of Hell, an expansion pack that doesn't try to be anything but; it simply isn't as good as the original.
- Hell & Damnation also got this reception. Coming on the heels of the universally despised Resurrection, it was acknowledged as being a vast improvement over the latter gameplay-wise, yet it was also heavily criticized for cutting out a huge chunk of the first game's levels so that they could be sold as DLC.
- That One Level:
- Leningrad in Battle Out of Hell. Squads upon squads of Dirty Communist zombies, all of whom have hitscan weapons and deadly accuracy. And if they're not zombies, they're tanks (plural), which can almost take more damage as they can give back out. And that's not even counting the airstrikes the Commisars can call in...
- The original Painkiller has Snowy Bridge for its sudden Difficulty Spike (waves of ninjas and samurai that are much bigger than previous levels) and forced sniping sections (in a game with no real sniping weapon) with the stake gun and it's arcing shots. The level is also extremely long on top of being the game's ice level and the card's requirement will make you look up a guide on how to get all of the 6 treasures. At least the card you get is nice, as it drops the demon mode requirement from 66 to 50, much easier to reach.
- Docks in the same game is this for enemies that shoot fast-moving, hard-to-see projectiles in tight alleyways and take a beating and several spots with hefty, unavoidable fall damage. The Skulls are the worse of the bunch as they can blow up their heads to become temporarily invincible and are immune to the shotgun's freeze attack. At least the card is easy to get as all you have to do is enter Demon Morph mode three times, something you will try to do.
- The forest level in Painkiller creatively called "Forest", accessible only in Trauma Difficulty, has no health pickups, a horde of enemies thrown at you right from the start, and one secret is particularly ludicrous. (Keep in mind that you can't quicksave in Trauma) Also, the card condition prohibits you from using black tarot cards, which certainly doesn't help matters. On the plus side, the level is blissfully short and the card it gives, "Divine Intervention", has pretty nice as it makes any cards you place free.
- Dead Marsh in Overdose, for its near-impossible melee-only card condition (in a level filled with insta-death pits, flying monsters and tentacles that can hurt you even before its animation plays out).
- They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Virtually everything in Resurrection is copied and pasted from Painkiller, Battle Out Of Hell and Overdose, except for one new enemy type (available in three sizes!) and one new weapon (essentially the Bolt Gun from Battle Out Of Hell with a reskin). At least the guys who made Overdose were creative enough to make some new enemies and remodel the guns...
- And then in Redemption, all the levels in the game are just multiplayer levels from the original Painkiller, with tons of monsters added.
- Tough Act to Follow: The entire series got worse and worse after the first game, as each of the differing developers that followed after People Can Fly ignored(or simply didn't understand) the subtleties and blatancies that made the original Painkiller so good. As a GameSpot review for Resurrection puts it:"While the original game is still a treat for old-school shooter fans who won't let go of DOOM, all of the expansions and stand-alone add-ons have been pretty much atrocious. Let's hope that Painkiller: Resurrection is the last nail in the coffin."
- Many players felt that even the first expansion, Battle Out of Hell, which was also developed by the original developers, wasn't quite up to par with the original game's material, mostly because the expansion pack consisted entirely of levels and weapons that were previously cut from the original game due to time constraints or quality control. To put things into perspective, People Can Fly spent almost three years working on Painkiller alone, and Battle Out of Hell was released six months later.
