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Infernal

Holy cyber ninja monks, Batman!

Story details of Infernal are somewhat... unusual. Etherlight is apparently a brotherhood of monks with a healthy taste for high tech gadgetry, their own private army and and a leader bent on dominating the world [and what's unusual about that? - narcissistic Ed]. In addition to the usual selection of pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, rocket launchers and a juicy flamethrower, you can find laser pistols, plasma cannons and shurikens from the corpses of these good guys. Apparently these monks have also been trained as ninjas.

Etherlight also has a certified mad scientist, secret bases and megalomaniac plots worthy of a James Bond movie, with our fallen angel playing the role of the guy designated to save the day - uncover the plot, find the nutjob leader and blow up secret bases. All in all, while the general concept of playing a fallen angel on a rampage is not bad, the storyline is disjointed and full of implausible twists and plot holes. Some of the script is actually so cheesy that it becomes hilariously funny - Lennox in particular delivers some memorable one-liners. Refreshingly, the story isn't quite as black and white as you'd initially expect, and there is a working surprise or two along the way, and in the end the biggest flaw probably is that the adventure ends up being quite short with just five missions.

Demonic powers

There are some perks that come with the job when you are working as a hired gun for the middle management of the Devil himself. Once the opening warm up is over and the "deal with the devil" is done, some neat abilities open up. Lennox can "supercharge" the shots of any weapon for extra damage at the cost of some mana. To bypass security systems Lennox can also use mana to self-teleport. This works very much like spirit walking in Prey - you can temporarily teleport to another spot you can see, and later on you can chain these teleports to quickly activate multiple switches. Unlike the aforementioned spirit moves, here you can also still shoot stuff while being temporarily in another location and this is used as a working gimmick in some boss fights. Mana to fuel these powers can be replenished by killing people and sucking up their souls or by replenishing the pool from hidden shadowy spots that you can find using your special vision ability.

Most of the obstacles can be bypassed using one of the special abilities - some specific spots are breakable when shot with a "supercharged" blast, some doors open by finding a keycard from a corpse and in rest of the cases you usually need to hit some switch, with or without the aid of the self-teleportation ability.

Quick teleport to the terminal to open the door.

Playing around with some building blocks.

The guys of Metropolis Software have also been "inspired" by Half-Life 2 - the Gravity Gun has been lifted and re-done as "item teleportation". While there is no combat use for this, you can use it to move some obstacles away, build stacks of objects to reach some otherwise unreachable locations or to recover otherwise inaccessible dead bodies for some soul-sucking. With the item teleportation ability you can move a "ghost" of the item to a spot you want, and the item then moves there in a flash of light. Not quite as entertaining as the Gravity Gun but it does allow the odd HL2-style tricks.

While some of the props can be shot to pieces, and in some cases you can blow up or break obstacles using guns, most of the landscape is indestructible. This also means that in many cases while the most obvious solution to advance would be to break out a big gun and just blast your way forward, you have to play by the rules set by the developers and find the intended solution to the problem at hand. Solutions are almost always logical and if you are stumped, it's usually only a matter of figuring out a new way to apply an existing ability.

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