Infernal: Hell's Vengeance Review
Infernal: Hell's Vengeance is a game from Polish developer, Metropolis Software, and is a port from the original PC game, Infernal, that was released back in 2007. The game is a third person shooter based around the constant struggle between Heaven and Hell, except with a more "human" approach to the conflict. Heaven and Hell are both at each other's throats, using agents of the Abyss and an agency known as Etherlight to carry out their deeds.
Players take control of Ryan Lennox, a fallen angel. During a brief meeting with one of Etherlights agents, he receives a mysterious phone call telling him he's due to be "dealt" with. A gun battle ensues and despite his female companion aiding his escape from Etherlight, he soon finds himself meeting the man whom he spoke on the phone with. This man is Lucius Black, the head of Abyss.
The story is really vague as essentially the only reason Ryan changes sides, is to give himself the power to protect himself. There's ultimately no real reason for anything that Ryan is doing or why Etherlight are portrayed quite so malevolently. This so called Abyss faction, want to get rid of Etherlight but the only discernable reason is that they just don't like each other. Some loose ends are tied up later in the story, but it all seems very questionable.
The game is a third person shooter and in this genre there are gameplay elements that have become standard. The ability to take cover is one of these elements, but it's extremely difficult to use in Infernal. Most of the time, it's often more of a hinderance than an actual help and coupling this with crouching makes Ryan more of an open target than dodging normally. Most of this is down to the fact the controls are extremely insensitive; doing anything with any degree of precision is near impossible. Some of this can be blamed on the severe frame rate issues though.
There are some very innovative ideas in place throughout the game though, which revolve around the powers that Ryan acquires, and how they are implemented. Infernal vision allows players to see codes on walls to unlock doors, and to see health and mana pickups that are invisible to the normal eye. Ryan can also charge up all his weapons with mana to do extra damage and the effect and feel of that is rather fun to play with. It's arguably one of the most entertaining aspects of the game.
The other power which is intriguing is Teleportation. This is acquired later and is quite a nice game mechanic, but it's just a shame that the game doesn't utilise its full potential. The controls for it are awkward and due to its large mana cost it's only really used to solve puzzles. It would have been cool if it could have been used in combat for stealthy kills. That said, players get to move objects around using a similar teleportation method and some more volatile ones can be exploded wherever Ryan pleases. This allows players to set up some much needed traps when ammo is at a low.
