There's plenty of shooting and deading involved, but usually at least one of the demonic powers is called for too. There's also some passably thoughtful boss fights - we're not talking Zelda here, but most aren't purely shoot-until-dead. At times, hitting a (usually rather too obviously signposted) obstacle and knowing which of Dave's handful of otherwordly abilities will overcome it creates the requisite sense of fluid omnipotence he's supposed to have. Not remotely new ideas - the spectral vision is straight from the Soul Reaver games and the temporary teleport was recently seen in Prey - but they do reveal an intent to be more than a pure bulletforce game. Presentation values are all over the place (not least in some particularly excruciating voicework) and it lacks the vaguely cinematic grandness that made SiN: Emergence at least bearable, but it has more variety and ideas. In other ways though, it's a superior game to the last SiN. Given its silly story, perhaps it's just read too many comics that concern a modern-day war between heaven and hell, in which case it should really put down the Spawn books and read some Preacher instead. Initial talk of sex and high blasphemy reveal a game that believes itself to be mature, but in reality it's brash, testosterone-soaked, stupid and probably thinks Michael Bay movies are the highest artform known to humankind. But while that had at least flashes of a poorly-realised attempt to be tongue-in-cheek, Infernal takes itself deadly seriously. Even some of the baddies are essentially interchangeable. Infernal's from a third-person perspective and slots in about four puzzle types on regular rotation, but otherwise it's exactly the same kind of hollow brawn that never got over early 90s videogame box art as the mercifully terminated (or at least on indefinite hiatus) SiN episodes were. Yep, SiN: Emergence by any other name still smells like rotting meat. So, near-future shooter, awful, puerile, heavy guitar soundtrack, deep-seated misogyny, pop-up baddies, AI that always chooses something highly explosive to stand next to, almost total obliviousness to the shooter landscape post-Half-Life, Halo et al. Souls: healthy and delicious, with a slightly damnationy aftertaste. He probably also wouldn't meet instant death from a 10ft drop, but then the game never explicitly states that an unfortunate side-effect of all his magic powers isn't having a horribly weak spine. He'd crash through walls, tear men limb-from-limb, repeatedly bellow "Look at me! I'm AWESOME" and finish the game in 20 minutes.
If Dave Angeldevil was the wisecracking, unflappable superpowered hulk he's supposed to be, he wouldn't waste his time scouring rooms full of barrels for switches to push so that a small glass panel on the other side of the room would slide open. There are ways to prevent players from escaping a carefully-arranged linear path without totally shattering in-game credibility - forcefields and heavy-duty security doors for instance things that at least look resistant to firearms - but Infernal's still moping around in the primordial slime on that front. With graphical technology at the height it is (Infernal actually looks pretty good, whilst also feeling kind of cheap), creating a world where incredibly heavy explosives cannot affect everyday scenery is increasingly ridiculous. The answer? Why, trudging around similar-looking corridors looking for keycards and buttons, of course. Which only makes it all the more surprising that Dave spends the next few hours being obstructed by wooden doors and flimsy chain barriers that his new ultra-destructo-power can't even dent. It's actually pretty cool - the game seems to be demonstrating that it's over-the-top, it's got decent physics and Dave's (alright, alright - 'Ryan Lennox', but the other name suits him better) a proper badass, living up to his status as a fallen angel now working for the forces of darkness (or at least some guy with a spooky voice). Back at the start of Infernal, Dave Angeldevil, or whatever the hell its straight-out-of-some-dismal-crap-on-Sky-One-around-11pm hero is called, is given a demonic power that can demolish metal doors and brick walls.