Not every game has to be a masterpiece to be worth playing. Groundbreaking, boundary pushing gameplay isn't a prerequisite to success by any means - sometimes a bit of silly, dumb fun will suffice just fine. This is what Playlogic seem to have banked on with the release of Infernal: Hell's Vengeance - and why not? It's worked in the past - just look at Earth Defence Force 2017; repetitive, derivative, overly simplistic and often, really quite ugly. It also happens to be extremely fun, highly addictive and much loved by a sizeable portion of the hardcore gaming community. Infernal, if anything, actually has higher ambitions than EDF 2017, but for that reason, maybe more than any other, Infernal has failed to capture that B-movie spirit that has served games such as EDF 2017 so well in the past.

The problem lies largely in the game's lack of a consistent tone; Infernal never quite manages to carve out its own identity. The dialogue is hammy and delivered in a fittingly over the top manner and the storyline of the battle between heaven and hell has all the potential for solid B-movie gold, but sadly it all clashes somewhat with the overly realistic depiction of gore and violence along with the title's other failed attempts to bring the core gameplay in line with many of the genre's big hitters. It also doesn't help that said core gameplay just isn't solid enough to carry a repetitive shooter of this nature.

Released to a very middling reception on PC back in 2007, Infernal's port has done little to suggest that Playlogic have raised their expectations for the 360 version. This is still the same linear, single player only game found on PCs over two years ago, and while it's being released at a budget price, for a console with so many great shooters already on the shelf, Infernal's blend of repetitive, glitchy gameplay will undoubtedly struggle to make any kind of impact on the platform.

Things actually start off quite promisingly, with all the hallmarks of a great B-movie storyline present and accounted for; intentionally bad dialogue and delivery - check. Ridiculous but intriguing plot - check. Protagonist with a name like a porn star - check. Sadly, these snippets of silly fun struggle to gel with many of Infernal's other more questionable design choices, culminating in a title that never feels like a cohesive, self assured product. Playing as Infernal's fallen angel anti-hero Ryan Lennox, you battle on the side of The Abyss, essentially the corporate face of hell, after being unceremoniously laid off by their heavenly counterparts, the EtherLight Corporation. With your new boss, the brilliantly named Lucius Black, happy to dish out all the darkly powers one might need to get straight to work, it's off to kill some of those pesky ex-colleagues by any means necessary - shoot 'em, shuriken 'em (yeah, don't know what they were thinking there), or use any one of your new demonic powers to take out those troublesome cyber-robed monks.

As potentially great a set up as this may be, it all gets lost amidst a sea of dodgy controls and wholly illogical puzzles as soon as you gain control of Ryan. While the over the shoulder camera and basic cover mechanics may be par for the course nowadays, Playlogic have somehow fumbled even the most basic of commands by delivering a control scheme that fights against you at every turn. Not only is the cover system largely useless, but it also has a tendency to pop you into cover when you least expect it. By pushing up against a wall with the control pad you should slide into cover, but the range seems overly sensitive and leads to many unwanted cases of wall hugging. It also doesn't help that getting yourself back off the wall is a lot more effort than it has any right to be. Then there is the matter of the invincible roll, a solid if basic idea in principle but one that has again been clumsily implemented into the control scheme. A double tap in any direction sends you into the roll, but with the move so easy to pull off by accident, expect much in the way of impromptu rolling around as you move from one room full of enemies to the next.

Once you get past the problems with basic movement, you then have to deal with the fiddly, inaccurate aiming. Even after experimenting with the sensitivity, aiming just never feels accurate or natural, and with the emphasis on balls to the wall action from beginning to end, these control issues suck any fun that could have been had from ploughing through the waves of gormless enemies that Infernal throws at you. Beyond the usual array of pistols, automatics and sniper rifles etc, Infernal also allows you to use an array of demonic powers to help in the extermination of your heavenly foes. Sadly, like nearly every other aspect of the game, fiddly controls conspire to steal any of the fun that Infernal has to offer. The short-range teleport system is a good idea on paper but far too inaccurate to be considered a triumph, while other powers such as infernal vision and the ability to shoot evil bullets feel underwhelming and somewhat forgettable.

One of Infernal's more interesting ideas comes in the form of soul-sucking, where you receive health and ammo bonuses by sucking the souls of defeated enemies. Infernal has attempted to do away with the traditional ammo and health pick-ups that have become a staple of the genre but even this potentially smart idea has been implemented poorly; not only does it take too long to suck an enemy's soul but it also needs to be done far too often, thus making it a monotonous chore rather than revolutionary or exciting in any way. Then there's the matter of disappearing enemies to deal with - you see, the enemies you have defeated disappear after a small amount of time, and with so many enemies eager to shoot you in the face, the fixed animation of you eagerly sucking a soul before it disappears while a room full of monks happily blast away at you becomes annoying rather quickly.

Even if you do get to grips with the controls, Infernal is just too average to be worth your time. It just never grabs your attention like other (good) games in the genre and lacks the charm or simple fun required of a basic run and gun shooter. In their defence, Playlogic have included a handful of puzzles in an attempt to mix up the gameplay, but they have ironically thrown logic out of the window and these basic puzzles soon become highly infuriating affairs. Infernal is a gameworld full of contradictions and this is never more apparent than in the puzzles that it asks you to perform. Break a window, climb a fence, make a two-metre jump; these are all basic enough requests when completing a puzzle, it's just that for the rest of the game, no windows can be smashed, no fences climbed and two-metre jumps are deadly to Ryan Lennox's surprisingly weak knees. Absolute madness.

Speaking of strange design choices, there's no autosave at all, leaving manual saves from the pause menu as your only option. This may make some of the trickier aspects of the game easier to handle but it can just as easily infuriate if your progress is suddenly halted by one of the game's more bizarre deaths (those two-metre death falls being a prime example) at a time when you have forgotten to save the game for a while.

One thing Infernal certainly does well though is locations. It may not be as pretty a game as it was back in 2007 on PC, but the visuals are certainly strong enough to show off the wide range of environments you traverse on your journey to take out the EtherLight Corporation; from the tops of moving trains and aircraft carriers through to the usual array of dark, dank corridors and impressively rendered monastery catacombs, the locations in Infernal are certainly varied and largely easy on the eyes. As for the enemies you come across at these locations, well, they aren't nearly as varied or exciting. Although enemies do get stronger as you progress, their tactics never really change and the feeling that you are entering one identical shooting gallery after another sets in reasonably quickly, regardless of the surprisingly pretty window dressing that each area has to offer. There are flying enemies and slightly tougher shock troopers to deal with, but again, the rinse and repeat mentality gets you through the majority of these encounters with relative ease. Bosses are also strangely underwhelming affairs, too; although none are terrible, few attempt to do anything new and all fall hugely short of the best that developers such as Capcom or Epic has to offer. There's also a plethora of technical issues that detract from the distinctive scenery and decent character detail, with frame rate issues, slowdown and clunky looking animations as the main offenders.

The audio is a bit of a mixed bag too. The cheesy dialogue and dodgy voice acting will split the audience down the middle, while basic weapon and ambient effects are passable without standing out in any way. The soundtrack however is much more likely to get your attention - but not in a good way, as the insistence on a generic metal riff kicking in every time you go into battle (which is most of the time) is likely to drive you up the wall, especially given that a very similar tune shows up every time you enter the pause menu.

Somewhere in Infernal: Hell's Vengeance is a solid if unspectacular addition to the shooting genre, but that game is buried under a pile of technical issues and poor design choices that ruin any chance that the game had of making an impact in an extremely competitive genre. If Playlogic had streamlined the controls and embraced a more fully realised B-movie aesthetic then Infernal may have found a niche audience, but as it stands, it will more than likely fall by the wayside without registering so much as a blip on the majority of gamers' radars, and with good reason.

Reviewed by Liam Pritchard for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).