Neon Inferno

SHOOT, DODGE AND TRY NOT TO DIE! Zenovia Interactive's second game does not disappoint! Fun run and gun gameplay and though hard it never felt impossible to beat the odds. Great artwork as well!

The demo was right. When I tried Neon Inferno's demo I had a lot of fun, and then I tried the team's first game, Steel Assault. That was... rough, but I was confident NI was going to be great. And it is! It's not perfect, but it's a really strong arcade game with a bygone sense of design. Were it snappier in its controls, it could have been basically flawless. We're put in the quite stylish shoes of hitmen Angelo Morano (Jin Kazama with a big ass cross necklace) and Mariana Vitti (absolute baddie), who work for the Venatori mob family. As such, they take on a variety of difficult missions to eliminate key targets in a dystopian, cyberpunkish NYC. The story is of course little more than a premise, in pure arcade fashion, but the presentation enhances the few ingredients stupendously. Character designs are incredible, with exquisite pixel art and some slick animations, and every mission has one or more art pieces to accompany it. The atmosphere is standard John Carpenter-slash-anime fare, but while not original it is crafted with gusto. The levels themselves are similarly immaculate artistically, with a true richness of small details and surprises that give depth to this arcadey w…

This game is extremely good. I played through the game on hard difficulty just for an extra challenge and enjoyed every moment of it. It's short, but all 5 hours of my playthrough were fantastic, especially with how much the set pieces change from level to level, there's no two levels that feel similar and it really strengthens the game from start to finish.

Neat run-and-gun with hints of boss-rush. Cuphead would be the most modern equivalent, but the gameplay here mostly harkens to the classics of the arcades and similar in the 16-bit era, and is quite challenging in a good way. The background shooting specially, a game mechanic all but forgotten from the aforementioned era, was a nice nostalgia trip. Pixel art is top tier excellent. Sound effects are good. Music is hit or miss... more frequently miss to be honest, which is a shame given the rest of the quality presentation and aesthetics. Easy recommendation for fans of the specific genre.

So much fun love it

I'll give this a thumbs up because the effort is great. The characters are cool, the aesthetic is awesome, it nails the old arcade game thing perfectly. The game seems designed for the people who want to either play or progress to its hardcore Arcade mode, and that is never going to be me. If you're that kind of player, then buy it, you'll like it. For me, though, it's too difficult to enjoy playing it. The transition between shooting foreground and background is awkward and leaves you standing helpless, and the controls for switching between the two is hard to feel comfortable with. It feels like you're forced to do too many things at once, and you can't just keep shooting at deal with it all like it's Contra or something since you're switching back and forth between two very different control schemes all the time. It's one of the best retro games I've played, but as a more casual player the difficulty makes me not really want to play it. How much you enjoy it and if it's worth picking up will depend entirely on what kind of player you are.