Dreamkiller

There's fuck all out at the moment so I was really pleased when Dreamkiller floated onto the tubes.

Dreamkiller has a very original premise and excellent artistic direction. I played two of the levels - a training mission where you entered the mind of an arachnophobic, which played out much as you'd expect. The second one was in the mind of a paranoiac who was scared he was being worked to death. Things started fairly normally until you got into the bowels of the dreamscape office building where the walls turned into massive filing cabinets spewing paper all over the player.

I say it's a very original premise, it's basically a rehash of Psychonaughts. From concept right down to disappointing gameplay.

The game plays out exactly like Painkiller but there are three very important differences:

1) The monsters

In Painkiller, the monsters were enormous Hellbeasts and they all made it very obvious when they were going to attack. This made them obviously threatening and made them more fun to kill. In Dreamkiller they just run at you and you get magically hurt. They're also usually quite small, which feels odd.

2) The weapons

They aren't as much fun as the Painkiller versions. I only got to play with a minigun and a shotgun. The minigun overheated after a few seconds so you never really got to cut loose (you've got infinite ammunition for all the weapons, you see, so they have to find ways to restrict you). The shotgun, on the other hand, was underpowered, fired too slowly and had quite a small spread.

Given that you spend pretty much all your time killing things in this game, the fact that the tools you use to dispatch the monsters aren't very fun to use means that any enjoyment you gain from the clever environments is sapped away whenever an enemy turns up.


3) You can only carry one gun at once.

And you don't get to switch very often. You get very, very bored of the guns when you're forced to use them.


Dreamkiller isn't really a bad game, you can definitely see potential lurking in there but a couple of niggling faults move it from inventive to frustrating and then frustrating to depressing. I wouldn't bother if I were you.