Painkiller: Black Edition
Worth it · Shooter · 2007
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
WAIT.
Worth it today. The Winter Sale opens Dec 17, and it was discounted in 8 of its last 8 seasonal sales; 80% in the Winter Sale 2025.
Today
$9.99Worth it
Typical seasonal cut
$1.9980% offWorth it
- Cost per hourS
- $0.97/hr
- Reviews▼
- 89% of 2,374
- Genre rank
- Top 10% Shooter
Holding it back: Reviews
Why
Watch this gameOne alert at $1.99 or less.
Time and effort
- Main story
- 10.3h
- To 100%
- 18.5h 1.8x the story
Price and sales
- Sales
- 77 on record
- Typical cut
- 80% off
- Steam low
- $1.99 October 2016
- Sale every
- 37d last September 2026
Players and genre
- Online
- 18 now
- Cheaper than
- 46% of its genre
- Better reviewed
- 79% of its genre
Price and player charts
The value story
The value story
77 discounts in the 11 years on record, a median of 80 percent off across all of them, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended about 4 weeks ago.
Its score puts it in the top 10 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 79 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, DOOM ($19.99, scores 79) beats it on value, while it beats Painkiller Hell & Damnation ($19.99, scores 54).
More about Painkiller: Black Edition
This site sampled 461 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to October 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 225 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 12 percent of everything written about it.
Buy now or wait
Buy now or wait
Last discount ended 31 days ago.
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
Grades: S best, D weakest
S is the best grade and D the weakest, judged as a buyer. ▲ raises the score, ▼ lowers it, ? is an input we do not have, • is a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
What players say
The first few levels are fun enough, but there are a bunch of small problems that add up quickly into a very frustrating experience if you actually try to play through the whole game. Below are some of the worst things I encountered (I played on Nightmare, the second-highest difficulty): - The game wants to be a run-and-gun boomer shooter where you're never stopping or doubling back, instead circle-strafing around...
2 more reviews, 2 not recommended
So Painkiller is one of those FPS games where i have tried it several times in the past to get into it and just bounced off. I alway felt the combat was bland, the weapons were rather limp minus the stake gun and the amount of buggy physics just all added up to a put off, everytime. Now in 2026 i just say stuff it! drop the difficulty to normal and just play through the game to tick it off and my god was it a slog...
Painkiller is one of those games that almost everyone will tell you is good, but very few people have actually finished-for good reason. It's a classic case of style over substance. Painkiller absolutely nails the vibe: the art direction is fantastic, the soundtrack is excellent, and the overall aesthetic is memorable. But the developers seemed to forget that gameplay should come first. If you take Quake, strip away...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
About the game
Painkiller Black Edition includes the expansion pack Battle Out of Hell, featuring 10 additional single-player levels and many new villains.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, DirextX 9.0 64MB Video Card, 3.4 GB of storage. Windows only.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Painkiller: Black Edition scores 73/100 on the BANG Score (worth it) as of Nov 8, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/39530/painkiller-black-editionReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Oct 31, price as of Nov 7. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.