Everyone’s laughed at pain at some point. Whether it’s watching the likes of Johnny Knoxville fool about with fireworks, or seeing an attempt at some ridiculous home stunt go disastrously wrong on You’ve Been Framed, there’s no denying the underlying humour. This is exactly what Idol Minds had in mind when developing PAIN – armed with extensive research, they decided to embark on creating a game involving comedy, random chaos, creativity, community and competition.

The basic premise of PAIN is simple: cause as much destruction and, yes, pain as possible. At your disposal is a gigantic man-sized catapult loaded with the character of your choice. Add this to a physics driven environment and away you go.

There are three different single player game modes in PAIN: Paindemonium, Mime Toss and Spank the Monkey. Paindemonium is the basic sandbox style environment where you have the chance to do whatever you want, for as long as you want whilst earning points for the amount of pain caused to your character. You get extra points for the chaos you cause in the environment, such as sending a giant bowling ball down a busy street or knocking down a tower of scaffolding. Mime Toss involves another aspect of the gameplay: picking things up. In this gameplay mode a mime is placed in mid air and the objective is to grab the mime as you hurl past, then throw them through numerous panes of glass placed around the level. Spank the Monkey, as you would imagine, is where monkeys are placed around the level one or two at a time, and your goal is to hit them as fast as possible.

Let’s focus on what you can do in the sandbox game. You can do a fair bit of damage by simply using the old ‘aim and fire’ trick but to really rack up the points you need to take advantage of character controls and the area around you. The first way you can do this is by grabbing onto things such as letters on the side of buildings, a giant bowling ball/pins or even an enormous spoon (in the particular map that we played on). You can then pull them down as you fall, causing chaos amongst the traffic below. There are also two types of explosive boxes in the game, one of which explodes on impact, the other which you are free to grab onto and throw to the target of your choice. For a game that seems relatively simple, there are a surprising amount of different ways to cause chaos.

Another thing to add to player controls is ‘Ooch’. Ooch, controlled by the directional pad, is a small after touch movement for when you collide with the first object. The idea is that if you land next to an explosive crate you can use ‘Ooch’ to direct the character into it for more points. You can do this four times and if you shake the Sixaxis controller you qualify for ‘Super Ooch’, giving you an extra higher speed boost. You also have the option of pulling off ‘styles’ as you hurl towards your destination - for example, you can power forward using a superman style pose or pull off the traditional ‘bomb’ stance while cruising towards a giant doughnut.

The game also has (offline) multiplayer with three modes of its own. In the first one, player one has to hit a target of their choice. The target and points achieved are recorded and it’s up to the second player to hit the same target and beat the score of the first player. If they succeed, control is handed back to the first player who has to then beat the second players’ score and so on. The second multiplayer mode is Bowling where one player hurls themselves towards the pins, while player two throws obstacles in their way, such as boxes, doughnuts or even old ladies. The bowler has the ability to grab onto these objects and attempt to deflect them. The last mode is ‘Fun with Explosions’, where the players fling themselves into explosive crates. The player who destroys/explodes the most crates wins.

There’s new player models, areas, items and gameplay modes all coming as regular updates via downloadable content, and you get hold of these from right inside the game, with no need to visit the Playstation Store. Also, every launch is recorded onto your hard drive and available for an instant replay. You will, apparently, soon be able to upload the recording to the PAIN servers for others to view and complete with score leaderboards.

There’s an extensive tutorial which you have to play through before starting, which does a very good job of explaining all the different things you’re able to do, and that’s just about it! Click through to view PAIN in action in the official PAIN advert.

By Tom Eccles