nfernal opens with a moderately embarrassing cutscene depicting the main character having lunch with a comely blonde. Here, the player learns that Angry Guy With Tattoos And A Goatee (the protagonist has a name, but this is how you’ll remember him) has been kicked out of Heaven’s army for unspecified infractions. After the cinema ends, the next order of business is slaughtering a few dozen of your former friends who are attacking you for unexplained reasons. Following that, an agent of Lucifer offers you a job working for the bad guys, which you accept for no better cause than “why the hell not,” as far as I can tell. After that, the experience starts really heading downhill.
The basic gameplay of Infernal consists of mixing up third-person shooting action with supernatural devil-granted powers and environmental puzzles while telling a story about morality, God, and the devil. Each of these elements is bad and nowhere close to fun, but to the developer’s credit they fail in varied ways. The most spectacular is definitely the broken action, though.
The majority of your time with Infernal (may it be short, for your sake) is spent gunning down goons in the employ of Heaven with one of a small handful of weapons. Despite the fact that their AI is very basic, these suckers are decent shots with their own weapons and they tend to come in packs, so Angry Guy is blessed with the ability to hide and blindfire behind cover as well as roll in any direction. Well, theoretically he is, anyway. In all my hours with the game, I could not for the life of me get the cover mechanic to work consistently, which strips almost the entire strategic element out of the combat. The roll-flip isn’t integrated into Angry Guy’s movement at all, either, so you’re looking at about a second of stuck-still animation time on either side of the maneuver – which is a really bad thing when there are five or six dudes unloading SMG clips in your direction.
Your small array of powers – a hell-charged shot that is cool but awfully tough to use in an actual combat situation, “infernal vision” that lets you see and collect health and mana powerups but doesn’t let you shoot while it’s active (yes, you read that right), and a five-second teleport that is completely worthless outside of a bare few puzzles – is supposed to make Infernal’s gameplay unique. Unfortunately, none of them are implemented well enough to be incorporated into how you play the game. They’re all so cumbersome to activate and/or use that they’re strictly relegated to specific sections, like when there’s a security console behind a locked gate that you have to teleport to, or a crumbling wall that a super-shot can break down.
On top of all this, most of the puzzles and boss fights either don’t challenge the player at all, like the above example, or have solutions so arbitrary that they don’t make sense. A few are noteworthy, but having one interesting encounter every two hours during this strictly linear adventure isn’t going to convince anyone to play this game. Angry Guy is a clichéd dud of an antihero, and the storytelling is clumsy at best. I love the subject matter (see my rabid Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom), but Infernal does nothing to take advantage of it – or be a fun game in its own right.