Infernal is an in-your-face demo of a game that’s all about kicking ass! Even the menu screen will kick you in the ass with your own face! In fact, the hero of the demo, the guy you play, is named Jake Asskicker. I know, it sounds like I’m making that up, but I’m not — that’s his actual name. Jake. Asskicker. I am not lying.
Okay, I’m lying. But you know the type, right? His hair is spiky, he’s got stubble, a goatee, a tattoo, he probably banged Lindsey Lohan just about the time when she started getting kind of repulsive, and he’s got that sort of wry growl when he responds to the overwhelming odds against him. “Looks like my weekend plans are ruined,” he might say detachedly when a fifty-foot mecho-demon bursts through his dining room floor. Or, when forty armed terrorists sound the alarm and start firing their machine guns at him, he might mutter, “Looks like they weren’t expecting company.” That sort of thing.
Oh, holy crap. No lie, I just looked up his actual name and this time I’m not even lying: Dark Eaville. Jesus. Tell me Jake Asskicker isn’t a more subtle name than Dark Eaville. Someone got paid to come up with that name and I’m sitting here giving away gems like Jake Asskicker for free.
Anyway, as Jake Asskicker, you’re some kind of supernatural commando that shadowy government agencies are always hiring to infiltrate lairs filled with gun-toting hooligans, in this case, some sort of cybernetic monks. As is required in such situations, some dude directs you through your mission with instructions via earpiece. Your first enemy is a technomonk who is sipping coffee and talking on a cellphone. Yeah, glad they called in a specialist to deal with the guy covering the front desk.
After you murder the monk, you’re instructed by your boss to suck out the monk’s soul. This will charge up your magic powers as well as give you ammo somehow. Jake Asskicker takes this all in stride. I’m not sure a) why he doesn’t already know that he can suck people’s souls out, or b) why, if he didn’t know he could suck people’s souls out, they waited until he was already on the mission to tell him. The ability to eat souls is not something you want to explain over a bluetooth. You really want to sit down in person with someone to deliver that kind of news. Especially if you may be called upon to suck out their souls through their assholes, as in this lovely example. That’s Jake Asskicker for you — he’ll kick your ass and then suck your soul out of it. Then he just might kick your soul’s ass! Your soul is having a terrible day!
Soul-sucking isn’t all Jake does in this demo — he can also set his own arm on fire and shoot people with it, and he possesses another unusual skill that is revealed upon entering a hallway with a laser beam security system. How will Jake get past the lasers? Lasers have no ass to kick! Confounded lasers!
As it turns out, Jake has the power to turn invisible — but only when he is doing a forward somersault. “Remember,” the guy on his headset says, “when rolling, you’re invisible.”
What the hell kind of power is that? How do rolling and invisibility even go together? I think everyone fantasizes about having the power of invisibility at some point, but would you even want it if it required you to roll around on the ground at all times? It sort of ruins the fun of spying on someone or sneaking around if you’re constantly having to hurl yourself forward, getting dirt in your hair and bruising your shoulder and being all red-faced and out of breath. That’s like being granted the power of flight but you can only achieve it by constantly doing jumping jacks.
At least the demo provides us with some quality cutscenes. Just check out the animation, voice-work, and plot advancement in this YouTube clip I uploaded. And the writing! My, that’s some convincing dialogue. If I were a cybermonk faced with intruder alert, I wouldn’t take chances either. I wouldn’t even risk taking chances. And I certainly wouldn’t gamble with rolling the dice on the risk of taking chances.
So, if you’ve been looking for a demo that’ll let you suck the soul out of a dead monk’s ass, you might want to give this one a try. Otherwise, I’d skip it. I’m sure there are some books on ass-kicking in your local library that you’ll find much more rewarding.
Rating:
29 responses so far ↓
1 jordan // Apr 22, 2008 at 11:20 pm
i know im probably a dumbass, but what is the rating symbols?
2 Christopher // Apr 22, 2008 at 11:23 pm
2 sticky bombs out of a possible 8. Like, the Demoman from TF2.
3 Trid3nt // Apr 22, 2008 at 11:43 pm
It might be good to have some reference, as 2/8 could be really poor, or it could be moderate, depending on how harsh you are
4 Derek // Apr 23, 2008 at 12:00 am
Dark Eaville? Are you serious?
5 Derek // Apr 23, 2008 at 12:00 am
Whoops, forgot this:
“?!?!?!!??!?!?!???!?”
6 Punjabi Fury // Apr 23, 2008 at 12:36 am
Good God that cutscene was bad. That would be bad for amateur machinima, let alone scenes from a budgeted game.
7 Joerdgs // Apr 23, 2008 at 2:20 am
Its a Dutch game… and those sadly enough, still kind of suck :(
I’m planning to change that though once I get out of university!
8 Crane // Apr 23, 2008 at 2:20 am
That cutscene was one of the most awful things ever. My GOD!
Captain Monotone and Fake-British Teenager!
9 CitrusFreak12 // Apr 23, 2008 at 5:31 am
Look at that rating system. How awesome is that.
10 macho // Apr 23, 2008 at 6:08 am
:) nice review. And that name Eaville is really lame.
11 Fullforce // Apr 23, 2008 at 6:40 am
The way the guy moves his arm to wave in that cutscene cracks me up every single time, for some reason.
12 sortie // Apr 23, 2008 at 7:27 am
Haha, I’d download that game just to experience how bad it is. See, if some things get good if they’re bad enough. ;-)
13 RobotLiberationArmy // Apr 23, 2008 at 9:23 am
If the next big budget action movie announced does not feature a character named Jake Asskicker, I will be very sad. Don’t risk taking chances Hollywood.
14 tiredinnuendo // Apr 23, 2008 at 9:30 am
I’m sorry, but Dark Eaville was a bit too much for me and I had to check your sources. It does (sadly) turn out that the main character in this game is called Ryan Lennox, however, I could find references to a “Dark Eaville” in a game called Diabolique – Licence To Sin.
I’ll admit this confused me, because you’d often see reviews of Diabolique pasted next to box art from Infernal, leading me to wonder if perhaps they simply changed the name. That said, the main character’s name is Ryan Lennox, which is a shame, because that’s far less funny.
- J
15 Soup Nazi // Apr 23, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Actually, I think Pentadact came up with it.
16 Christopher // Apr 23, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Pentadact = Tom
Hm. I believe they changed the name of the game from Diabolique to Infernal — but I see Infernal reviews that mention his name is Dark Eaville as well as Ryan Lennox. Maybe one is the European version or something?
I dunno. Dark Eaville is way better than Ryan Lennox, anyway.
17 SenatorPalpatine // Apr 23, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Jake Ryan Dark Eaville Asskicker Lennox.
The perfect name, no?
18 Sam // Apr 23, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Ugh, I played that demo. It wasn’t very good.
Funny review.
Also, what is your email these days? I did ask the other day:P
19 TK // Apr 23, 2008 at 4:23 pm
SenatorPalpatine: That is the single finest name I have ever seen.
20 chris12 // Apr 23, 2008 at 8:26 pm
jake asskickin, haha
21 noclip // Apr 23, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Wow. This is a shoe-in for this year’s You’re Winner Game Writing Award.
22 VashPL // Apr 24, 2008 at 2:23 am
>>Its a Dutch game…<<
Nope it’s not. It’s Polish game made by Metropolis Software.
23 Pentadact/Tom // Apr 24, 2008 at 7:08 am
Awesome rating system. It is even more glorious than I envisioned: I wouldn’t have thought of having blast-marks for the missing stickies to indicate to non-Demomen the potential maximum.
It could even be ten-point scale, if you gave no unexploded stickies to worthless demos and all sparkly crits for maximum awe.
P.S. Isn’t EAVille the name of the MMOG EA turned the Sims Online into?
24 sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT // Apr 24, 2008 at 8:54 am
How did those terrorists get forty arms? Are they from, like, Chernobyl?
…
I know what he meant, shut up. Let me have my fun.
25 Soup Nazi // Apr 24, 2008 at 1:47 pm
“Pentadact=Tom”
I feel pretty dumb now.
I’ll be over here, not sobbing.
26 Lindsay Lohan Celebrity Gossip | Demoman: Infernal // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:19 am
[…] His hair is spiky, he’s got stubble, a goatee, a tattoo, he probably banged Lindsey Lohan just about the time when she started getting kind of repulsive, and h… Source: Demoman: Infernal […]
27 BumbleCrap // Apr 25, 2008 at 9:57 am
This game was part of the Eidos Holiday Pack on Steam around Christmas ‘07. The pack included other, better games that I wanted to play, so I bought it when the price dropped. As a consequence, I actually played Infernal.
When I got the Holiday Pack, I stuck to a rule: I would play the games until I couldn’t anymore, then move on and try the next one. With most, the point where I couldn’t play anymore was the end (Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Kane & Lynch). With some, I couldn’t play anymore when the game was too buggy to run on my machine and I couldn’t progress (those were Just Cause, Project: Snowblind, and sadly Rogue Trooper).
I stopped playing Infernal two levels after that cutscene happened. I was hoping against hope that the dialogue and story would improve if I got farther in the game, and was sorely disappointed. Unfortunately, Ryan Lennox a.k.a. Jake Asskicker is a one-dimensional character that doesn’t seem to give two shits about anything, including being used by Satan for his dirty work. He’s a thick-skulled puppet who is extremely lucky that his enemies have the collective intelligence of a retarded ferret. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of how Satan convinced him to become an Infernal Agent (ugh…):
Satan: “Come work for me.”
Lennox: “Why?”
Satan: “Why not?”
Lennox: “Good point.”
The cover mechanics pissed me off, too. There were so many times when I tried to take cover behind a barrel or pillar or something, and Lennox flat out refused to do so. On that note, the only passive cover system I’ve ever seen that didn’t suck donkey balls was the one used in Army of Two. Apparently it’s very hard to get something like that right.
Well, that was long-winded. Summary: the game is as bad as the demo suggests. Don’t play it if you can at all avoid it.
28 Fishy Boy // May 4, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’m glad devolopers are taking a step forward! In old, crappy games like Doom and Quake, enemies would just drop ammo. Now, you can suck souls to make ammo, and out of people’s asses! That’s a great way to improve gameplay!
29 Francis // Jul 2, 2008 at 3:38 pm
@joerdgs: a) it’s not a Dutch game at all, as VashPL already said and b) Killzone is a dutch game!
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