Infernal Hands-On

A new action adventure game that chronicles the fight between good and evil, Infernal is an upcoming PC title from Polish developer Metropolis Software. We were lucky enough to sit down with Metropolis and spend some time with the game recently, ahead of its scheduled Q4 2006 release. The game was shown at this year's E3, and since then the development team has been able to drop in new technology, features, and graphical effects, as well as reveal a little more about the game's storyline.

Previously known as Diabolique: Licence to Sin, the game received a name change after it was signed by publisher Playlogic Entertainment. Set in a contemporary world, the game tells a story of good versus evil on an epic scale, with each side represented on Earth as two separate agencies. Continually striking a delicate balance, the Abyss agency handles the interests of Hell, while EtherLight is doing God's good work, so to speak. You play Ryan Lennox, the most effective EtherLight agent in the business, but that's only thanks to his taste for destruction. Because of this, he's eventually fired from the agency and stripped of his powers, leaving him defenseless and vulnerable.

Even worse for Lennox is a loophole in the system that occurs once a millennium that prevents God from seeing what's happening on Earth. This means that all evil can go unpunished, and as a result the EtherLight agency heads about destroying Abyss once and for all--threatening to devastate the delicate balance of good and evil. The boss of Abyss calls on Lennox to help him, promising to restore his powers in a darker form. Lennox agrees to this pact, and the story continues to tell of his switch from good guy to bad guy.

While the storyline sounds like particularly contrived hokum, it does offer plenty of scope for an action adventure game. Played over the shoulder and featuring intense combat and sorcery, Infernal immediately appears to be a mix of Resident Evil 4 and Psi-Ops. As well as using high-impact selection of weapons that includes pistols, machine guns, and flamethrowers, Lennox also has the ability to use magic spells to cause explosions and teleport himself. The latter is a particularly impressive skill, as it allows you to temporarily move behind an enemy and avoid their fire, or reposition yourself in order to flick a switch. However, these skills in magic are dependent on mana reserves, which can be replenished by 'absorbing' fallen enemies. Much like in Psi-Ops, your character can walk up to bodies and suck up their life force, taking health and mana in the process.

There will be five chapters in the final release, and four of them were playable when we saw the game. During these example levels, Infernal threw up a nice mix of locations, each with individual challenges. On the aeroplane-based level, shooting will damage the integrity of the aircraft, so you're restricted to melee combat. Another level set on a train puts you in charge of a gun turret to take out enemies before using the teleportation ability to flick switches that are too far away to reach. Teleportation can also be used to kill enemies with flamethrowers by appearing behind them and blowing up the gas canister on their back before they even know what happened. The final level we saw, set in a church, saw Lennox's demonic abilities diminished thanks to divine intervention, so his mana was even slower to replenish.

Playing on a laptop computer on a 40-inch LCD TV, Infernal is graphically impressive, although it does suffer from prohibitive slowdown at this stage. While the engine is entirely Metropolis' own creation, the developer has been able to drop in technologies such as AGEIA's physics engine PhysX, which was recently seen in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. The game will also take advantage of the latest graphics cards for shader model 3.0 and normal-mapping, and at this stage the results look fantastic. The shimmering water is as effective as that seen in Half-Life 2, and Lennox's leather jacket looks real enough to touch.

At this point, Infernal is a PC-exclusive title, although there's a distinct possibility of a next-gen console version. The title shows plenty of promise and is far more polished than we had any right to expect. The developer will have an updated version of the game shown at the forthcoming Leipzig Games Convention, and with a Q4 2006 release date, we'll have more on this title later in the year.