Pain

It's a cheap PS3 title that is good for some immature giggles. Which is great, but there's a little problem...

Pain is a cheap downloadable game for Playstation 3 that emulates the kind of snigger and laugh you feel whenever you crush a full can of coke under the wheel of a car.

It’s got the same kind of simplicity about it too. You catapult a character through a map of a few city blocks in an attempt to do the most damage to your crash test dummy and the surroundings as you can. You get points for destruction of the environment and yourself; and your multiplier increases every time you hit something in the world as you bounce through it to an eventual stop.

To extend the time between launching and the end of your turn, you get a few ways to keep your momentum up. The first are the cars that loop around the city block (and surrounding half-block edges). You also get four short boosts (called Ooch; one burst for each letter) and a degree of control over which direction they send you.



Ooch recharges every two seconds after it’s depleted, provided you’re moving, but it never gives you enough momentum to move indefinitely. For that you need to rely on cars and other tricks hidden in the map which are quite hard and fun to try and hit before you stop moving and your turn is over.

Once you fly into the air, you can grab onto most of the items in the level. You can even pull some of them down to the street with you. Pile on the points, giggle, rinse, lather and repeat.

There’s a bit more depth in the multiplayer games, which will have you bouncing between different explosive crates, setting the highest score in a game of Horse (think Tony Hawk -- loser gets a letter, first to spell out the word is the loser) and catapulting you character at a ten pins. In that last one, your opponent gets to set off booby traps to throw you off course.



You may have noticed that despite sounding like fun, I haven’t gotten excited about Pain throughout this review. That’s largely because of it feels like a demo. Although there’s quite a bit of fun to be had, after playing for a few hours it starts to feel like it’s doing for the Havok physics engine what the mini games in Wii Play do for the Wiimote.

Sure, it’s more grandiose, has a scoring system, sense of competition and accomplishment. But the concept is only a little more complex than a simple flash game. It’s really Kitty Cannon (warning: addictive fun) taken into a 3D environment by the Cell processor, with the world slowed down so you can appreciate the anarchy you bring to the game world with each collision.



The simple concept just doesn’t have enough variety. The simple joy in watching construction material fall from the sky and cars explode and characters ragdoll needs an injection of something else.

As it stands it’s fun, but if there was more than one map, and you didn’t have to fork out more money for more characters, things would be better.

It does, however, make for a good drinking game. And when combined with a small RRP, that’s probably incentive enough for many of you to grab it.