Retroware and Zenovia Interactive’s Neon Inferno is a striking run-and-gun shooter seeped in brooding mood, it is loaded with action, and has a deep, memorable tone. While the personality and visuals are cranked to eleven, sadly, the gameplay doesn’t exactly match high presentation values.
The action takes heavy inspiration from classics like Contra and Wild Guns and merges them into something uniquely personal. Instead of just shooting left and right, the player also needs to take out throngs of baddies by shooting into the background. On paper, this sounds like a fun gallery-shooting gameplay element, and it is entertaining, until it isn’t. Neon Inferno is one of those games that demand trial-and-error perfection until you build enough muscle memory to survive each stage. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, this game doesn’t hold back and shooting into the secondary background layer amplifies the difficulty.
After spending hours murdering hundreds of cyborg bad-guy fodder, I figured out why I found the fun factor to be limiting and it mostly stems from the aiming. Shooting left and right is simple and works just fine. Also, aiming into the background also works well with the default control scheme but with one issue – the cursor placement. When aiming into the background, your cursor doesn’t default to the desired starting position. Meaning, you need to stop, aim into the background, then move the cursor all the way to the other side of the screen which simply takes too much time. By the time the cursor reaches the other side, the target has moved and enemies in the foreground are already doing damage. This creates frustration and artificial difficulty that follows the player through the entire campaign. Also, it seemed like the devs knew of this issue as reflectable shots move very slowly, which is not consistent with the rest of the action. Simply put, there is usually too much happening and the player doesn’t have all the necessary tools to appropriately manage it all.
The quest to assassinate the handful of high-profile targets only takes a couple of hours and is more enjoyable in local co-op but the entire game is essentially one giant boss rush mode. The action never stops, requiring finger gymnastics at every moment. Thankfully, there are liberal checkpoints in place, but the lack of temporary power-ups and special weapons makes the experience feel empty. It is possible to level up weaponry after each stage, but this is entirely dependent on the player’s skill. Unfortunately, Neon Inferno is one of those games that grades the player at the end of each stage, and your grade determines how much credit you receive. In other words, unless you spend hours perfecting your approach through sheer memorization, you will only receive the lowest score which means your weapon upgrades can only unlock at a snail’s pace. Also, most Achievements are geared around playing perfectly so Gamerscore hunters might want to take note.
There is no questioning the visual grace of Neon Inferno. It looks amazing. But I cannot help but feel that most of the effort went into making the game look beautiful as the off pace balancing and difficulty unfortunately distracts from the overall fun factor. By no means is this a bad game but one that doesn’t come strongly recommended as the visuals easily suggest.
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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RATING
OUR SCORE - 6.5
6.5
SCORE
Neon Inferno is a gorgeous game that mixes side scrolling Contra action with the background targeting of Wild Guns but doesn’t exactly play as well as it looks.
Editor in Chief - been writing for mygamer,com for 20+ years. Gaming enthusiast. Hater of pants. Publisher of obscure gaming content on my YT channel.
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