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GGMania has posted up a hands-on preview of Painkiller, the upcoming first-person horror shooter from People Can Fly (ex-members of Lemon Interactive) and Dreamcatcher Interactive. The preview is based on playing an early beta build of the game. We also grabbed 30 new screenshots from the beta build.

Painkiller is a first-person horror shooter, designed to satisfy the gamer's hunger for intense, fast-paced action. You play as Daniel Garner, a seemingly regular guy who as just been killed in a horrific car accident. Trapped in a dark and unwelcoming world between heaven and hell, you struggling to uncover the reasons why you've been denied entry into heaven. Awaiting your purification, you must fight through a seemingly endless number of demon soldiers as you to attempt to stop an imminent unholy war. In other words, you are Painkiller, a mercenary for hire, charged with cleaning out nests of the undead. In the game it means you have to shoot everything that moves.

The beta version has three levels, Chaos Cathedral, Ruins (Boss Arena), and City on the Water. The first placed in dark corridors that open up into an impossibly tall gothic cathedral, the second level (boss level) is a big arena with black clouds billowing overhead and there is huge metal giant with a hammer and the third level which is set in Venice-like city with many monsters coming at you from all sides. The enemies are already dead (zombies, demons, etc.), they don't care about their health; all they want to do is to get you at all cost. If you've played any of the PC versions of Serious Sam, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Painkiller is all about mindless frantic action.

The weapons I saw in this beta version were a chain gun/missile launcher and machine gun/grenade launcher. That mean every weapon consists of 2 modules, for example you fire module 1 (for example Machine Gun) with Fire button, and module 2 (for example Grenade Launcher) with Alternative Fire button. So you execute combos, for example you can shoot the grenade with your machine gun, making its explosion 4 times more powerful.

Graphically, the game is very nice. Painkiller is developed on a in-house engine called PAIN that handles everything very well. There are an interiors as well as exteriors levels, explosions realistically blow up monsters (to be exact, explosions send bodies flying in all directions...) and they have solid rag doll physics when they die, weapon and lighting effects are pretty solid too. Of course, the blood is everywhere :P

The sounds and music were exceptionally good considering the early state of this beta. Nothing disturbs your adrenaline level better than some good hard rock/metal, and this is what Painkiller offers during the battles. It really reminded me of the early days of Quake and the killer rock tunes they used in that game. The sound effects for the weapons and monsters were all excellent.

Of course, you will need strong PC to be able to see the game in all its glory. Painkiller requires GForce 4 as minimum, they suggest GForce FX or ATI Radeon 9700/9800 and P4/Athlon 2GHz+ CPU. (Update: Of course, the game will be playable on GF2 MX / 1.4GHz CPU too, but of course it won't look much pretty)

Overall, the game looks great and has a ton of potential. Painkiller reminds me of the good DOOM days in terms of playability.Yeah, It feels very old school just like DOOM, Quake, Blood, hopefully the end result will be better than Gore! Hopefully, they won't manage to screw up this promising game even before it will be released :) Because I cannot wait to play this baby in multiplayer! Especially, I'd like to add my very strong support for co-op :P