Title Infernal Date 10.12.2007 Genre FPS Platform PC Developer Playlogic Publisher Eidos Interactive

It's fitting that the plot is about a battle between heaven and hell, since the game itself has characteristics of both. It's surprisingly pretty, even on older machines, and combat can be fun and challenging. But that's all it has to offer. The rest is a jumble of horrid acting, clunky controls, linearity, cheesy plotlines, keycard hunting, and sometimes ridiculous difficulty.

But that's not what makes the game so frustrating. The worst part of all is, despite its many flaws, it's just fun enough that you want to play it through to the end. So you torture yourself over and over again, hoping to see the credits roll so you can go play something better. It's the car accident of gaming: You simply cannot look away, no matter how much you want to.

This game is so overwhelmingly average that there's no point in reviewing the plot, controls, etc. separately. They are just run of the mill. But I'd like to focus on the voice acting, which is so amateurish; you'd swear this game was a high school project of some sort.

Sentences are spoken with the wrong words emphasized (much like William Shatner), the voices rarely match the character's appearance (there's an unintentionally funny sequence involving a balding, middle-aged monk with the voice of a teenager), and the main character talks like every single action hero before him. It just seems like nobody really cared to give an effort.

One last thing: someone needs to license this engine for a quality game. It's wonderfully optimized, and looks amazing, despite a few rather low-poly objects. The main character looks great, with an ever-present glint in his eyes, and realistic clothing and skin textures. A couple lesser characters are less detailed, with plastic-looking hair and jagged polygons poking out, but it's forgivable. The environments are gorgeous, with plenty of bloom and particle effects, and somehow Infernal manages to breathe new life into the same tired locations you've seen in every action game for years.

I'm not surprised that this game had almost zero marketing, and that not many people even know of its existence (outside of the GameTap community, which recently acquired it).  It truly seems to me that the developers just didn't care about Infernal. They knew it was bland, and they didn't bother to go back and fix it.

In short, if you ever see this game marked down to a couple bucks, it's worth it. But at any price higher than that, don't bother. You've seen it all before, and the potential lost on Infernal is saddening.

Game Score

D

Reviewed By: Contributed