Review | Infernal: Hell’s Vengeance
Format: Xbox360 | Genre: Action | Publisher: Playlogic | Developer: Metropolis | Release date: 28/08/09 | RRP: £29.99
By Lewis Denby
There’s a debate over whether reviewers should complete games before penning their subsequent verdicts.
Many feel doing so is the only way to fairly and accurately appraise a game. Others point to statistics that suggest very few players complete all their purchases – so why should reviewers distance themselves from their audience by always striving to do so?
I didn’t finish Infernal: Hell’s Vengeance – and not finishing a game even though you’re really trying to can be quite telling. If you’re not having any fun after five or six hours, and everything’s just descending into more ludicrous scenarios, horrendous difficulty spikes and abhorrent level design, the likelihood is you wouldn’t be able to recommend it even if it did something awe-inspiring in its final sections. If you can’t even bring yourself to plod on and find out, there’s something very wrong indeed.
Curiously, although Infernal: Hell’s Vengeance finds itself in this situation, it’s not an immediately hateful game. This conversion of a two-year-old PC shooter starts as it means to go on, with an opening that teeters on the tightrope between endearingly silly and flat-out stupid. It may have edged towards the former if it had been simple to understand, but Infernal’s introductory cut-scene doesn’t make things particularly easy. You’re Ryan Lennox, an angel thrown out of heaven, betrayed by his friend and suddenly being chased through an implausibly large bar by an army of… angelic mercenaries? It’s hard to tell, and the game makes very little effort to put it all into some kind of context.
//Monk-y business
You’ll quickly realise that aiming is cripplingly slow, the controls oddly unresponsive and AI virtually nonexistent. Though these people – whoever they are – clearly want you dead, they seem confident that your inability to shoot in a straight line will keep them safe. No evasion tactics necessary.
But once things get going – after you sign a deal with a man who looks a bit like Wesley Snipes but who I think is supposed to be the Devil – things start to look up. Sure, it’s cripplingly linear, with any semblance of an actual world ruined by conveniently stacked boxes, oddly positioned fences or straight-up invisible walls, but the increasing ludicrousness of the situation starts to become engaging. Your first mission is to infiltrate a monastery hidden away in a snow-covered village, because… you know what? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s not important. What’s very important is that it leads to the opportunity to mow down armies of monks with a fistful of shurikens.
More interesting mechanics quickly come into play, as your deal with the dark one led to your acquisition of a number of special powers. Hanging about in dark areas, or taking the lives of others, increases your mana. With it, you can do things like power up a super-strength gunshot, or temporarily teleport from one place to another. But everything becomes a little fiddly, with too many control combinations to remember, and often too little time to work them out. And charging these skills up feels terribly artificial. There are plenty of dark areas scattered about Infernal that don’t give you a boost at all. Instead, the game arbitrarily places light sources for you to shoot out, and doing so gradually drags your mana bar back to full. It’s all dictated and predefined, meaning you’ll often find yourself backtracking minutes to the last destroyed light source, rather than sitting in the pitch-black corner three metres away.
Equally awkward is the way your health is managed. It’s recharged by consuming the souls of fallen enemies, which also automatically searches their corpses for weapons, ammunition and level-essential items. But doing so is just too slow a process, and when you’re faced with multiple enemies – a frequent occurrence – it’s not practical to spend a few seconds at a time regaining your strength while the rest of the mob continues to shoot away and deplete it.
While it’s possible to ignore the annoyances for a while, and focus on the ridiculous joy of blasting through reams of monks, it all wears thin when you realise the game isn’t ever going to do anything particularly interesting. Ultimately, it’s a game you’re very unlikely to see through to its conclusion.
It’s a repetitive trawl through dull, linear and largely static environments, that sees you pitted against increasingly powerful and numerous enemies. Signposting is atrocious, and hideous difficulty spikes are frequent, even though you can usually soak up a frankly stupid amount of bullets. It all amounts to a game that fails to deliver any sustainable entertainment, even though a bulk of it lets you shoot monks in the face. There must be some kind of award for that.
3/10
