xxxIndyxxx: Yes I agree, but I don't think they intended to make a doom clone. It's the media who labeled it an oldschool shooter.
The GoG version of Painkiller (Black Edition?) has an some extra videos, one o them is a making of where one f the devs says they made Painkiller like an old-school shooter, so it's not just the media. The problem with painkiller is that they looked at games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D and only saw killing enemies. So they made a game where you kill enemies. However, those games were not just shooting galleries, they were adventures and survival games as well.
See, in a Doom-school shooter the levels are like mazes, like a real place you might go to. There are shortcuts and secret areas with hidden power ups. Often times the resources you find in those levels are very scarce and you will want to find the secets not just for the sake of completition, but because it helps you. You could run into a room guns blazing or you could try and be more sneaky. All this made the game feel very organic, like a place that migh actually exist and a situation you might actually get into.
Painkiller lacks this illusion, it's just killing things. There is nothing wrong with that, but it lacks the immersion and world-building. Levels have little to no connection to each other or grounding in the world, they are just chose because they are cool. Enemies have no interesting placement, they just spawn out of nowhere inside the enemy bubbles. i mean, what are all those monsters doing, are they seriously all sitting in one spot waitign for me come by? In Doom monsteres were all over the place, patrolling, holding positions, or scouting.
