LET IT DIE: INFERNO

I.... Wanted to love this game... I really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ did. It looked different than the original, which isn't ideal. But I was willing to overlook it, because different doesn't mean bad. But holy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥. This is obscene. No sense of progression: You make "runs" through Hell, and complete tasks before you are allowed to leave. Typical extraction-type, whatever. You succeed, your "body rank" goes up, you keep what you kill, and you get a nice "orb" to boost your stats, along with stat points to boost a different-but-overlapping series of stats.... A little convoluted, but okay... If you die, you lose everything that matters. Loot, orbs, body rank. All you really keep is the stat points to boost the other set of stats, but those barely do ♥♥♥♥ from what I've seen. Instead of having the option to go straight back to where you died, you have to start from the very start, with all the levels prior. Compared to the original, this setup feels like a digital hamster wheel. Add in the fact that you lose ALL ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PROGRESS at the end of the season, and it feels like this game is just... pointless to play... There's no real incentive to move forward, compared to the last game. If all your ♥♥♥♥ is gonna get reset in a few months, then what's the point of grinding? There's very few cosmetics to earn. Even though you buy the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, you can't grind for death medals to buy the swag. You have to pay more money in the game you paid for to get that. God help Gung-Ho if that too gets cleared in the resets... Gameplay: AI is one of two things: Easy-cheese, or Satan's second butthole. Non-humanoid enemies are extremely predictable. Humanoid enemies on the other hand are.... I honestly feel like they're programmed with cheats in them. They move at the speed of light while you move like Joe Biden trotting through molasses. Their strikes are faster, their pace is faster. In fact, if I didn't know any better, their speed is on par with how YOU moved in the original game. There's no sense of "fair" like there was in the original. Sure, you'd get ambushed in the Tower of Barbs by a random horde here and there, but with the right moxie, a pinch of elbow-grease, and a butterfly knife with a notch of durability left, you can squeeze your perpetually-pantless ass out of there just fine. Here, it feels like the game reads your buttons, then strikes as soon as you press. It doesn't feel responsive to your character actually moving in-game half the time. It feels like they lost the talent that knew how to make difficulty work in the last game, so they just kind of threw an intern on it to guess how ♥♥♥♥ works. Glaze-City: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this game does its best to suck your ♥♥♥♥ every chance it gets. In the original, you did have Uncle Death hyping you up. But he was the only one doing that, and his motives at the time were... Questionable in hindsight.... I'm hoping that later in this game's story, there's a bit of a bait-n-switch to reveal it as a ruse. Because anything other than that feels like this game is apologizing for existing, and trying everything it can to beg you to keep playing using its cast of obvious waifus and washed out, quirky old men. And it really doesn't help that Jukka Hilden isn't reprising Uncle Death. The character just isn't the same. And it's a shame, because the new VA is really trying his best and you can tell. It just doesn't deliver without that Finnish charm. Story: The story of the original blurred the line between fiction and reality, deliberately hiding lore and letting the characters speak for themselves. You play as a gamer in an arcade, playing a game. And in-game it seems the apocalypse has occurred. But over time, it gets harder to tell where the real world ends and the game world begins. Are you *just* playing a game in a game? Or are you using a game to control a series of zombie proxies to clear out the Tower of Barbs that exists in real life and is inaccessible to normal living humans? It's just not clear, and there's something so beautiful about that. But in Inferno, that all goes out the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ window. There's an attempt to replicate the idea, but it just comes off as a shallow rehash complete with the "we have to beat the evil corporation to stop the end of the world" schtick. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if they really went all out on the campiness to sell it. But they take it so damned seriously, even all the NPCs are literally just depressed sad-sacks who barely bother to hide it. The character writing feels like a cry for help from the developers themselves. All their regrets, angst, and worries left over from the failure of Deathverse just got bundled up and thrown into this. It would be compelling, if the game were worth a ♥♥♥♥. The inherent mirth in the original is just gone here. And no matter how hard they try to replicate it, it'll always be an obvious replication. I want to love this game, but I only want to love it because I want this IP to survive. I don't have faith it will. I bought this for the price of a half-pint of Paul Masson, and I still feel like I got robbed. There's too much broken, and too much wrong with this game for it to survive long enough to save itself. I pray I'm wrong.