Just to get started on this review let me tell you this game took me longer to complete than any other game I can think of. I purchased the “Eidos Everything Pack” on Steam, and installed and played this game, never having heard of it before.
The oldest savegame I have is dated 7/26/2008 and I finished it today 6/25/2009. So that is 11 months to complete it. In all fairness it didn’t take me 11 months playing every day to complete this game, rather the game was so terrible, I had to play each segment months apart, as to keep my sanity.
I don’t know why I finished this game. It wasn’t worth it, but I did. Now let me explain why.
The Review
Infernal is a 3rd Person Action Game that follow the story of Ryan Lennox, and ex angel gone demon, sent on a mission to find out about a machine capable of controlling minds. One man wants to use the machine to force everyone to be good, another wants to use it to force hellfire upon earth. Of course Ryan is caught up in the middle of all this, and of course no one trusts anybody.
As far as graphics and sound go, the game was fine. It didn’t look as good as other titles released in 2007, but it did look good, and certainly not dated. The audio was fine as well, except the background music was extremely annoying and the player might want to turn background music volume down.
Game play is where this game really lacks. It is too repetitive. The whole game is basically walking around shooting things. Occasionally the player has to solve some kind of puzzle, and this is so different from the rest of the game that the player might be clueless as to what to do. The difficultly of the game is inconsistent. The prelude is extremely easy, the first mission isn’t too difficult, but then really difficult sequences come up, and finally the game is easy again.
Boss battles are fairly traditional in that there is some special way to defeat the boss, but the game is not fun enough for the player to want to figure out how to defeat the boss. Resulting to a guide to find out how to quickly dispatch a boss is highly recommended. Of course boss battles are far and few because this game is simply too long. Half way through the second mission, it really feels like this game should be coming to and end, but there are still three and a half missions to go.
Overall the game is simply not fun. Games are supposed to be fun, or why would you play them. Most of the time this game is too repetitive to be fun, the rest of the time it is too frustrating. Frustration is probably the worst emotion that a video game can generate and this game is full of it. Completing this game is a chore. You should get paid to play it, not the other way around.
The final verdict is that though the game looks pretty, it is just not worth your time.