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Garner, who is trapped in a horrible purgatory after dying in a car accident, is eager to escape his nightmare prison. Though Hell & Damnation offers a somewhat different tale that is only loosely based on both the original game and the Battle Out of Hell expansion, it's a recognizable concept to anybody who has played the Painkiller series. The ensuing ridiculous carnage of flying appendages packs a lot of insanity into a brief but wonderfully gory frolic. It provides you with a toolkit of twisted weaponry and constantly bombards you with enormous swarms of demonic creatures. This recreation of the gruesome original is unflinchingly old-school, fast-paced, campy as hell, and action-packed.
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The genre's return to its primitive beginnings is wonderful, even if it feels like the gaming equivalent of a junk food binge. Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, a throwback to a simpler age of first-person shooters, is considerably more concerned with corpse counts and blood spray than gameplay complexity.
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