In addition to your standard array of pistols and automatics, you get to play around with some demonic powers. The most useful of these powers is a soul-sucking ability that lets you gain health and ammo from dead soldiers. This is a good idea in theory, moving away from the automatic health regeneration typical for the genre, but it is irritating in practice. It takes more than five seconds to pull off this action, and because you have to perform this move throughout the game whenever you need a refill, it gets extremely tedious before long. Furthermore, dead enemies disappear far too quickly, which forces you to hunt down corpses before the room is cleared of living attackers, needlessly putting you into harm's way. Another power lets you charge up your gun so it can shoot evil bullets, but your normal attackers are so weak that using this ability is pointless unless you're fighting a boss. Finally, although you can teleport both yourself and other objects to solve puzzles, these instances are quite rare; the powers feel like a missed opportunity. It's probably for the best, though, because controlling these teleportations is just as awkward as every other action in this game.
A choppy frame rate makes this scene move only slightly smoother than this screenshot.
If the shoddy controls and tedious demon powers are enough to derail this shooter, the inconsistent logic dooms it. The levels in Infernal are linear, but you will often find yourself stuck because the game doesn't stay true to its own set of rules. Glass is bulletproof everywhere in game except for one section where you must shoot out a pane of glass to advance; fences can't be climbed at all or have barbed-wire at the top except for one instance where you must climb over a fence to reach freedom; switches can be triggered by teleporting nearby and hitting a button, except for one puzzle where this inexplicably doesn't work; and you can die by falling off some ledges that are only five feet in the air, but other boxes and platforms the same distance from the ground allow you to jump off with no repercussions. These inconsistencies make your quest frustrating, forcing you to go against the already established logic to progress.
Infernal: Hell's Vengeance is a forgettable shooter that spends more time irritating players with imprecise controls and illogical puzzles than it does entertaining them with thrilling action or killer set piece battles. The save system is another annoyance. There is no autosave option or checkpoints, so you must remember to save manually. Although this make it easier to bypass the trickier portions, fiddling around in the menus takes too long, destroying much of the appeal of quick saving. Even the best moments of Infernal, when enemies are swarming and explosions are going off all around you, are hampered by a stuttering frame rate that make these sections nearly unplayable. It doesn't matter if it's bargain price, full price, or flat-out free, Infernal is not worth your time.
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