Pain review (PS3)

Did you ever play Saints Row? Well I’m guessing Idol Minds, the developer of Pain, probably did. In it were a series of activity missions called Insurance Fraud that were arguably the most fun aspect of the game. You had to essentially cause as much damage to yourself as possible, gaining more cash for more painful looking injuries, from running into oncoming traffic to smashing your head against a building. Perhaps not in such a directly derogatory manner, Pain takes this enjoyable pass time and crafts it into a more complete game.

No story, no reason for it… simply start the game and you’ll be loaded onto a slingshot, ready to launch you into a busy city environment to cause as much damage and pain to yourself and the world as possible. Needless to say, the area has been crafted to make the most of your single launch location with tactically placed explosive boxes, destructible scaffolding and generally anything that seems like it could fall will.

The start is a lie

Technically, when you begin you won’t be able to fling yourself into explosives, mascot wearing pedestrians and mimes, because you’ll need to complete the detailed tutorial first. It’s all given to you in manageable bite sized chunks and spoon feeds the different aspects of the game nicely, but cannot be skipped or quit out of without requiring you to redo it all before getting into the meat of the game (as I learned twice). 15 minutes later and you’ll have the Ooches, Super Ooches, drifting and grabbing all nailed, so it’d be a very useful starting point even if it wasn’t obligatory.

Essentially, you’re setting up the aim and the power of your launch, but that in itself wouldn’t be much of a game. While flying through the air, you can hold the left stick in a direction to drift that way, altering your aim, or just helping you rebound into more destructive objects. While flying through the air you can adopt poses to increase the style of your launch by holding L1 or L2 and a face button, which gives you more points but little more. Further to this, if you hit something and are holding a face button on its own you’ll grab onto it in that direction, adding your weight to the object, perhaps flinging you around with it and generally influencing the decent physics engine in your own way.

Never forget the Ooch

Not just the sound of pain (or Pain), Ooches are your final control to help you maximise your overall score. After hitting something, you are able to nudge yourself in a direction with the d-pad up to 4 times every couple of seconds until you come to a complete stop. It’s useful if you’re trying to get into position for a car to run you over, or just roll off the edge of a building, but especially with the (bear with me here) Super Ooch move, gained by shaking the controller around until your Ooch bar is set on fire.

In perhaps the most contrived but still useful aspect of the game, Super Ooches simply nudge you more forcefully in the correct direction, but serve to extend your combo more often than you may give the wincefully titled move credit for. The main tip to gaining points is creating a large combo of different items that you have collided with, and the higher the better, however it counts for the same amount if you slam into an exploding phone box as roll over a manhole cover, though not necessarily for your standard pain points.

Tossing mimes or spanking the monkey?

If the standard game-type starts getting tedious, you could also try one of the alternatives, starting with the Mime Toss that floats one of those icons of almost universal hatred in front of you and demands that you grab onto him and fling him into a series of panes of glass scattered around the landscape. The objective is to destroy all the glass as quickly as possible, and while you’ll get penalties for breaking the glass yourself if you miss the mime, break them after throwing your mime friend away and there’s no problem.

The next gametype involves you launching yourself at monkeys that appear firstly one then two at a time. It’s really just a target range, and tries to get you to hit a certain amount as quickly as possible. It’s not quite as interesting as the Mime Toss, but wins points of its own for at least trying to be more unique. Finally there’s a (thankfully free) downloadable ‘mission’ called Fun With Explosives that scatters explosive boxes around the city and tasks you with hitting as many of them as possible in your path of destruction. Simplistic yet satisfying when you manage to rig up a good combo, but considering the limited movement after being thrown in one direction, it doesn’t last long. Considering our wait for the game, it seems strange that we have to download it separately, but at least the price tag remains invisible.

That damn ‘Manhole’ sign

Multiplayer features seem to be the biggest pull for me, and I’ve spent a substantial amount more time playing with a friend (yes even my non gamer friends) than on my own. Horse is your standard ‘beat the score of your opponent or get a letter’ outing, nicely tweaked by letting you choose the word, no doubt the joy of some expletive shouting teenagers. Another outing for Fun With Explosives seems less fun here though, with the apparent randomness of success giving luck the real victory in this mode.

The final mode is Bowling that gives you a full frame to beat your opponent(s). Cleverly, rather than just slinging yourself at the pins (that are sometimes Mimes that try to dodge, to mix things up a bit) your foes can activate a selection of obstacles to block your attempts, from dropping explosive boxes in your path to a frustratingly large ‘Manhole’ sign that seems to always swing round and swot you from the air. How come my ‘friends’ always get to use that one?

Trophies!

All gametypes have ‘achievement’ style objectives that unlock trophies if you accomplish them. Some unlock an extra character and costumes while some give you a harder difficulty in the mode you’re trying with alternative layouts, the main mode’s version shifts the most important objects around the landscape, and is dubbed ‘Aftermath’, taking place two weeks after your first attempt at ‘Pandemonium’. It all adds up to replayability, and will undoubtedly be added to when the expansion pack giving you a new level to hurt yourself in (an indoor theme park according to an in-game signpost), and in terms of downloadable content, there are already a selection of characters that you can buy to replace the original bloke, each at 69p.

For me, the game shines when competing against friends, and laughing at the utter sadistic situation, however the majority of the time it all boils down to aiming at something to hit and landing on the road, hoping to be knocked backwards and forwards a few times by the approaching cars to rack up the big scores. Not to say that it isn’t fun, but Pain is clearly a victim of its own hype. Perhaps not intentionally, but because we’ve had a few months since its appearance on the US PlayStation Store, those of us waiting for the game to be released have put the game far above where it should be, on a pedestal. In some ways, the game was better back when no-one had been waiting so long for it, but it’s certainly got a bit of life in its masochistic tongue in cheek action; and of course it’s just a fiver.