Alright so I hear it is pretty bad. But is it "not as good as Painkiller but still okay", or is it "if you were the president and someone threw Overdose in your direction, a secret service agent would leap in front of you in slow motion and scream NOOOOOOOOO"?
Using Painkiller as a frame of reference, Battle Out of Hell would probably be the standard for "not as good as Painkiller but still okay." Overdose is... uh. Oh boy, um...
Okay, so... take Caleb from Blood, and remove all but about half a dozen of the one-liners he says in combat, and add a couple level-specific comments that vary in quality from bad to very bad (alternately, take Caleb from Blood II). That's the protagonist.
Next, combine the laser from the painkiller's secondary fire with the shot from the demon morph, at their original power levels (which, for those of you who haven't played Painkiller, means that they're pretty darn powerful)), and stick them both onto a severed head. That's your starting weapon
After that, make the following modifications to the weapons: Reskin the painkiller; reskin the shotgun but make the spread wider and add a noticeable delay between firing the freezer and firing a shell to shatter someone; reskin the chaingun/rocket launcher; reskin the boltgun from BOoH and have it fire less bolts per shot; reskin the stakegun and replace the grenade launcher with the flamethrower from BOoH, only both the stakes and the flames are neon puke green. Then, add a knife that shoots homing skulls and exploding fetus bombs. That's your arsenal.
version: You have mostly Painkiller's weapons, but they're not as good with the exception of the starting weapon which
outclasses everything.
Level design! Take Painkiller's levels and have someone make more levels for it only make sure they have
no idea as to what made Painkiller's levels good! Brotip: Spawning those slow, giant enemies with no melee attack in droves? Not a good plan. Spawning enemies on top of you? Still not a good plan. Small arenas? Ridiculous level conditions? Stealing chunks of levels wholesale from BOoH, including about 75% of Loony Park?
What the hell is wrong with you?It's... not that good compared to Painkiller. It's not even that good compared to most FPSes. If you can get it for free then I'd say try it but don't expect much. Or anything.
Research suggests that it was originally a player mod and feels like one. I suppose it comes down to whether or not you liked Final DOOM and that sort of thing.
Oh, woah woah woah woah WOAH now! Final Doom... yes, that was a (commercial and id-endorsed) player mod, but Final Doom was fucking incredible. It was made by people who knew how to make Doom levels, which is good, because if they didn't know how to make Doom levels odds are they wouldn't have been approached in the first place. The politics behind what happened with Evilution is ancient history as far as I'm concerned, but equating Final Doom with Painkiller: Overdose? No way. That shit
ain't gonna fly.
Quasi-related tangent: The two guys responsible for The Plutonia Experiment - Milo and Dario Casali - managed to get the by impressing id Software. Later on Dario was picked up by Valve for Half-Life, HL2 and TF2. You know Ravenholm? Gold Rush? Badwater Basin? All him, baby.