Review by: Brandon "Mittens Rock" Cackowski-Schnell

Infernal: Hell's Vengeance is the perfect example of a game that takes several humongous steps backwards for every tiny step forward. The story is a mildly interesting take on the war between heaven and hell, fitting ex-Angelic soldier Ryan Lennox with demonic powers as he works for his former enemy and takes on Heaven, his former employer. Unfortunately the story is told via poor writing, lengthy exposition, bad voice work and an attempt at a quirky sense of humor that has Lennox quipping about sex and mittens in an effort to be hip and cool.

Lennox has demonic powers, but they're either poorly implemented or don't work how you'd expect them to. His Infernal blast can blow open walls, but not locked iron gates, or similarly locked doors are indestrctible requiring tedious backtracking to find security keys. The teleportation power doesn't teleport you so much as momentarily shift you several feet forward which, while effective for disabling security systems is clunky and damn near impossible to figure out when first used.

Lennox can drain souls to regain health and mana but the animation required for such an action takes a good three seconds, three seconds where you'll be shot at the entire time because enemy bodies fade away if you don't harvest them quickly enough. As a result you're constantly running out into the open to nab souls causing you to lose more health than you recover. Seeing how this is the only way to pick up ammo other than the occasionally well stocked crate, you'll have to harvest souls even when the sum gain of recovered health isn't much of a gain at all.

You'll come across the usual arsenal of weapons but weapon switching is poorly implemented and aiming feels slow and clunky even with increased sensitivity. The game has a cover system, but when hiding behind low cover, Lennox's entire head is exposed which allows him to take damage and when he's hiding beside a doorway, firing from behind cover causes him to step entirely into the line of fire, again, taking damage and, worst of all, throwing your aim off. Finally, while the game allows you to save any where, there's no auto-save meaning that if you don't stop and save the game every few minutes, or after every major enemy encounter, you'll be treated to a host of backtracking upon your untimely death.

All of this is to say nothing about the repetitive level design and enemy encounters, the brain dead AI, complete with brain dead AI statements like "He's vanished!" when all you've done is go through a door. Oh, and did I mention that for all of his badass demonic powers, Ryan Lennox is incapable of surviving a three foot fall into water? Looks like someone needed to pay more attention during swim class. Everything comes together into a game that is good for an unintentional laugh at first but quicky descends into a monotonous, tedious mess.

As the game was released a couple of years ago on the PC and met with lackluster reviews, I'm not sure what the motivation was behind re-releasing it on the 360 without addressing any of its many, many faults. Whatever the reasoning, there are so many quality shooters on the 360 and there's so much wrong with this game that even with Infernal's budget price, there's no reason to check this one out.

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