A slick, attractive, and creative shooter that trips itself up by being a little too clumsy.
Initially, our impressions of Infernal, a third-person shooter from Metropolis Software and Playlogic, weren't very good. The dialogue is painfully cheesy, often with embarrassingly bad voice acting. The gameplay is repetitive with multiple areas requiring annoying backtracking made worse by respawning enemies. Then something surprising happened. As we got further into the game the levels continued to change and stay fresh and the boss fights we encountered actually became a good deal of fun, going a fair way toward keeping the game from falling into complete mediocrity.
Powered by Hellfire
The storyline for Infernal may sound a bit familiar. You play as a renegade angel named Ryan Lennox. For some reason or other, a bad man named Lucius Black has recruited you to bat for the other team; you know, the one that smells of sulfur and likes using fire to dish out eternal torment. They hire you to take down Etherlight, Heaven's "secret agency," and recover a powerful new device for Mr. Black that can control all the souls on Earth. To this end, you have been imbued with demonic powers.
These demonic powers go a long way toward making Infernal stand out from other shooters. One of your most basic powers is the ability to charge any weapon you wield with a burst of "hellfire." This is done with your alternate fire button and adds a big punch to your shots. You can use this power to charge everything from your Walther P99 pistol to your AK-47 to a rocket launcher. Certain enemies will have special shielding that requires a hellfire-infused shot to take down.
Your other powers include the ability to temporarily teleport yourself to a nearby location, a special Infernal Vision, a roll move that makes you temporarily invincible, and a tool to teleport objects and other people. Each of these abilities will come into play during the game and you'll have to use them all if you plan on reaching the end. Basic puzzles will have you teleporting through a wall to throw a switch, while more advanced puzzles will have you teleporting objects to bypass barriers. Using your powers eats up mana, which can be recharged by killing people, resting on unholy ground, or picking up mana spheres which are visible only when using Infernal Vision.
Hostile Territory
The puzzles aren't especially great, but the bosses are. One highlight is when you fight a CH-53 Sea Stallion (a big helicopter) on the deck of an aircraft carrier, complete with burning F/A-18s on the runway. A mini-boss fight has you eluding walking mechs in the hanger of the same aircraft carrier with nothing but explosive barrels, a pistol, and laser trip mines in your inventory and your demonic powers temporarily disabled.
Sadly, combat with regular enemies isn't nearly as fun. The fault doesn't lie with the AI; these guys at least know how to take cover and will juke and dive and roll to avoid their inevitable deaths at your hands. What's annoying is the way bad guys will respawn. Respawning bad buys alone isn't a huge problem in shooter like this, but it's the way that they respawn which irks us. There were countless times when we'd go in a room, kill everyone inside, and then leave only to get shot in the back by a baddie who walked out of the very same room.
Being challenged by the sheer number of enemies isn't so bad, but getting gunned down by enemies who appear out of nowhere isn't any fun. Granted, there are certain enemies who are supposed to be able to teleport, but our beef is with the regular guys who just appear out of empty rooms and hallways and start shooting us in the back. Pair this with levels that require lots of backtracking and you've got a recipe for unhappy gaming.
It All Adds Up
The annoying respawn system is bad enough on its own, but there are other small problems that come together to drag down the overall. The self-teleportation system can get tricky when you want to go to a precise location, and setting multiple waypoints only complicates matters. Teleporting objects can be frustrating too because you move them much like the way you'd move objects using the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, only with much clunkier controls. Barrels and boxes will often get stuck in the environment, forcing you to cancel your teleport attempt and start over from the beginning, and some items just refuse to budge at all despite the indicator on your reticule that says you can teleport it. Also, there will be times when Lennox himself will get stuck just by standing near a crate or a box and have to roll to get out of it.
There is a cover system in Infermal but it's practically useless. You'll often take cover against a surface when you don't want to and other times Lennox won't take cover when you do want him to. The rules for what's usable as cover and what isn't seem completely arbitrary. Even when you do take cover its value is limited because when you spin out to fire, you're completely vulnerable, and you spin in and out so slowly that you'll get hit multiple times while you're doing it. We ended up giving up on the cover system all together.
Then there's the matter of the cheesy dialogue and poor voice acting. There's actually a boss who says, "Here comes the bazooka!" Also, the storyline doesn't make sense. Why does your character throw in with the side of Hell so quickly? How does he go from being a righteous angel to someone who goes around sucking up the souls of heaven's agents for health? By the time the game is over, you won't care.
What Infernal has to offer is very simple, pretty graphics, showcased in a variety of levels that take you from a mountainside monastery to an offshore train yard to an aircraft carrier, paired with decent action and surprisingly fun boss battles. Is all this worth the various niggling problems in the game? Barely. You'll probably fare better if you take this game in small chunks rather than a marathon session; still, if you look hard enough, there's some fun to be had.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Some things deserve to die.
Ryan Lennox is so pissed off his arm catches on fire. He's an angel, or at least he was, and now he's working for Hell to blow apart a secret heavenly outfit called EtherLight. As the main playable character in Infernal, a third-person action game from Eidos, it seems like a promising setup. Turns out it isn't.
They really tried for a snappy style of dialogue in this game; attempted to cobble together a wise-cracking, angel-turned-hellish-mercenary attitude. While you'll occasionally hear a sharp quip, such instances are stranded in a lake of convention and contrived one-liners. But the story isn't the main reason you're here, as unfortunately seems to be the case with most games.
Lennox has a bunch of tattoos, short spiky hair, and a tendency to kill things of angelic persuasions. He's supposed to be a badass. His feeble dialogue and utterly stereotypical enemies do a fine job of making sure Infernal's personality never strays from the mundane. But what about the one girl enemy whose skin-tight outfit has nipple outlines on it? She's cool, right? She and Lennox have a strained relationship but there's sexual tension writhing underneath. We've never seen that before.
Gameplay falls into the dialogue's mold: a few noteworthy sparks glittering over an expanse of cardboard. The demon powers can be entertaining for a short while though the level designs built to test your ability to implement them aren't particularly challenging. The weapons, enemy AI, and cover mechanics all suffer from awkwardness, uselessness, and blandness, in no particular order.
The shooting mechanics aren't that interesting, though. Foes display a decent amount of AI, helping to keep things engaging for at least a little while (like 10 minutes). Most of those who walk on the ground perform backflips, even when you're not shooting at them. At other times they'll do small head dodges, run from rooms, move into cover spots, and resist the temptation to charge through doorways directly into your gun barrel. You get flying enemies too, though they float around in generally the same spot. A few of the tougher enemies require more precise maneuvers to take down. The impossibly armored welders, for example, are only vulnerable in their backpacks (ingenious!).
Then there's the cover system, which is too slow to be useful. By pressing against a wall, which happens too often by accident, you can peek around corners to fire your weaponry. The issue is when you actually fire, Lennox steps entirely out of cover at a painfully slow rate. It's such a ponderous process that during a firefight, it's far more useful to just stay in the free-roaming WASD mode to dispatch your opponents.
Lennox can demonically siphon health and ammo from killed enemies by standing over them and hitting a key. It requires several seconds of charge time to complete, which can get aggravating. It makes sense in battle - if enemies are still around it challenges the player to strategically select which bodies can be safely drained. However, out of combat, you still have to feed on the fallen for a few seconds resulting in frequent lulls in an otherwise fast-paced game. Why not just switch the feed mechanic to instant-trigger after a room is cleared of bogeys? As it stands, the feeding or soul-sucking or whatever you want to call it is like dumping molasses on an ant.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved