Beautiful graphics with a reasonable story but a very linear plot and play

User Rating: 6.3 | Infernal PC
I enjoyed Infernal including the pretty original Boss levels (you do not need to figure out the exact combo of jumping, spinning, sticking your tongue out while using weapon x every 12.2 seconds while the Boss monster has it's left arm around behind it's back and it's right eye open). Add in a fairly straight forward series of puzzles and goals for each level, the game plays like a straight story with little complexity. But boy does it look great.

Your opponents also move pretty well including using their holy powers to make it hard for you to hit them. But you've got some neat and simple moves that are fun to play: diving and rolling turns you temporarily invisible. So changing sides of the door that you are hiding on really work: the enemy will come in and attack the side you were on and turn and look surprised when you shoot them from behind. Not many games keep track of that sort of thing. You can also get very creative with some of your powers: use the telekenises to preposition explosive oildrums well ahead so that when an enemy does attack (zone triggered attack patterns), you just detonate the drums and watch the bodies fly.

Some gripes include the fact that when you hide against an object and peak around the corner, the enemy seem to be able to hit you very easily: so much for hiding. Then there is the fact that you will occasionally "auto hide" against a surface when you just tried to walk around it and bumped the corner. That leads to the occasional path finding where you'll get hung up on corners of the floor (huh?) or some other edge. The only way out of that is to dive and roll. Bad guy speech is also quite boring. How many guys do you have to kill before their squad leader stops saying: hold the line he cannot break through (despite that you've progressed through the entire building?). Also your cute but mostly not very helpful counter agent doesn't seem to complain when you suck souls from dead bodies right in front of her: definitely a missed opportunity.

Overall I liked playing the game: sneaking through a monestary basement with dust motes floating in the air, destroying boxes etc, in a huge foundry, train yards, cramped interior of an aircraft.