Dreamkiller started out promisingly enough. The basic concept is sound. It consists of a series of themed nightmares, each presented as a self-contained level in which you upgrade your weapons as you go by collecting tokens dropped by monsters. Move to a waypoint. Fight monsters. Then the door to the next waypoint unlocks. Where you fight more monsters to unlock the door to the next waypoint. Eventually, a boss happens. Then you get your score for the level. Then everything resets for the next themed nightmare.

It's got three strange touches that were intriguing at first, but I don't think they serve the game well.

Read about them after the jump.

First is a berserker mode obviously inspired by Painkiller. Rack up enough kills and the world goes black-and-white for a while. Enemies stand out blood red against the background. You do extra damage when you attack. But in Painkiller's berserker mode, you were so berserk that you simply clicked on an enemy to pop it like a blood squib. Here you're still waiting on the shotgun to reload or the minigun to plink down enough damage. It's pretty restrained for a berserk mode. It's more like a quad damage pick-up. It's not nearly as dramatic as its visual effect, much less as dramatic as Painkiller.

The second strange touch is a psychic version of the translocator from Unreal Tournament. You can press the Q key to shoot forward an image of yourself. Press Q again and you'll zap ahead to the image, all for the low low cost of some of that mana you're not using because the magic attack is borderline useless. You can apparently score telefrags this way, but I'd just as soon wait until the shotgun is ready to fire again.

The third and strangest touch is the concept of overlapping realities. While you're fighting a bunch of enemies, some of them are insubstantial. You can't hurt them. They, however, can hurt you. To kill them, you have to step through a portal that turns the level all shimmery. This swaps which enemies can be hurt. Cool, huh?

No. Annoying. It basically means that you can only shoot half of the enemies you're fighting, while all of them can shoot you. It's a cheap way of making you take twice as long to play an area. Dreamkiller is double-dipping in the space-time continuum.

Regardless of strange touches that do or don't work, Dreamkiller is just so darn homogeneous despite attempts at trippy levels, otherworldly enemies, and over-the-top weapons. It all comes down to running backward with the shotgun. Or maybe running backwards with the minigun. For this to work, you need cool things to shoot, and ideally they should die in cool ways. But that doesn't happen here. A spider might as well be a mechadog. A brute with an axe might as well be a be-tentacled sailor. Once you've circle-strafed one thirty-foot tall boss to death, you've circled strafed them all.

This game is the polar opposite of Necrovision, another recent Painkiller homage. Necrovision was genuinely inspired, a rough-hewn fever dream built out of feature creep and bad graphics tech. Dreamkiller has a slick enough engine and a tight sense of focus, but there's no inspiration here. You can only run backwards and shoot for so long before you look over your shoulder and see you're not headed anywhere interesting.