Painkiller: Pandemonium - PC

Painkiller: Pandemonium offers quite a package - all four Painkiller games in one box!

For starters, Painkiller for the PC offered all the usual fast and frantic Quake-style shoot-em-up action amidst a dark and sinister survival horror setting.

The concept of the game sees you explore an assortment of grim environments, shooting anything and everything that moves, before consuming the souls of the dead in order to increase your health. Once you've blasted seven bells out of them, certain objects leave gold coins behind, which enable you to purchase new weapons and things like upgraded speed, as well as maps and numerous other power-ups between levels.

There are a total of 19 levels to be undertaken in the single-player game, packed with 20 different enemy monsters, each in possession of its own unique behavioural patterns and attacks. Have no fear though, as the game sports a specially-designed weapon system that provides the ideal number of weapons, each boasting both primary and secondary modes that, for the more advanced Painkiller player, can be used in rather spectacular 'combo' attacks.

Obviously no game such as this would be complete without a range of LAN/online-based multiplayer modes - the fact that the game's developers are Quake world champions ensures Painkiller doesn't disappoint. As such, up to 32 players can battle it out across a total of five different modes, including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, People Can Fly, Voosh, and The Light Bearer.

Then, picking up right where the first game's story left off, Battle out of Hell includes an additional single-player chapter with 10 levels, as well as new multiplayer modes, maps and models. It also offers an amplified arsenal of un-deadly weapons, bigger and badder bosses and the map editor Software Development Kit.

Next up was a bit of a surprise - a fan mod that was picked up by publishers DreamCatcher and JoWood. Packed with tons of fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled single player and multiplayer levels of mayhem, Painkiller: Overdose brings with it 6 innovative new demonic weapons, mind-bending physics, lightning-fast multiplayer maps, over 40 demented and sickly-twisted monsters from Hell and gigantic end bosses that will blow your mind!

Finally, the most recent game in the franchise - Resurrection. It introduces a new Coop-Multiplayer campaign mode, new levels, new monsters and a whole new story. William ‘Wild Bill’ Sherman, an ex CIA Agent and specialist for dangerous missions in the Black Ops Special Unit has a big problem: during his last job, he has managed to not only kill the head of an illegal drug operation and a slew of innocent civilians, but himself in a fatal mistake. Trapped in a hostile place between heaven and hell, his soul flickers between the millions of faceless infidels and good and evil forces start to use Wild Bill for their own needs. But, it turns out that nothing is as it seemed at the beginning… more