I wouldn't recommend Inferno to those who are dungeon crawler curious, but it's a solid enough game for those who are fans of the genre.
Rather than have a team, you focus on a single character whose wandering around a demon infested world. It plays off the old levelling systems, whereby your skills improve the more you use them. This means you create your character more through playing rather than stat pumping. All together, this removes a lot of the tedium from the character creation and micro-managing side and allows you to get straight into the adventuring.
The creator has gone for an interesting world design, whereby the main map is absolutely huge, being 150/150 squares. The random clearings and tree tunnels give way from time to time to the blockier concrete walls of ruins. Within this, stairwells lead into dungeon tunnels, essentially a secondary underground map that's laid out to match the overworld locations of the stairs, but is a series of smaller dungeons below the ruins they're accessed by. In all of this there are tons of harvest hotspots, chests, and the demon enemies, all of whom are camped in a spot, meaning you can choose whether to fight or avoid, assuming they aren't blocking passages you need to get down. There's also tonnes of hidden walls, some of which are illusions you walk through, others requiring pressing the off-colour brick in the wall to open up, but all of which can be discovered yourself through spells that allow you to see through the illusion, or player logic since you can see the secret rooms on the map so will know there's likely a button somewhere around to press.
The combat system is a mix of turn based and the old school real time moving up and down the passage while lobbing items/swings at the enemy. It's a mix of managing your stamina between choosing when to defend, strike, cast a spell, or use an items. One of the more interesting aspects is that you type your spells out to cast them. You decide whether this would annoy you or not, but I found it added a level of engagement, so it worked for me.
After a couple of hours moving through the twisting forest, you eventually find a human settlement dead centre of the area. From here you have access to a few more character customisation features, and get access to some quests that are more there to guide you to the next region to explore than to create engagement, since they're all the same trio of: Kill boss; Free prisoners; Kill x demon nodes.
Beyond the explore/fight/loot routine, there are some puzzles baked in to break up the monotony. Some of these involve finding the notes with the combination to a multi-button device, there's a lock-picking reaction mini game, and, my personal favourite, a simple nonogram puzzle that I wish there had been more cases of. None of these are particularly hard, and most can be ignored if you so choose, with them blocking access to treasure rooms rather than storyline routes you have to travel.
The graphics do a solid job of painting a punk-rock demon world, with the monster models being uniquely horrific in their design complemented by a banging soundtrack. The creator has clearly gone strong on the aesthetics, and they succeeded with aplomb. The fact you collect blood and viscera as currency, and little things like building your adrenaline bar to go HAM mode after killing something in chopping it up for additional blood and guts all adds to this.
Where the game falls flat a tad is that it can get repetitive. While the assets are well made, they rarely change. While the maze of passages changes, the scenery doesn't. All forests look the same, as do the ruins, as do the dungeons. There's a handful of monster models in each region, but in the encounters where you fight 2-3 at a time, you fight the same model 2-3 times, meaning it feels more like the creature has 3 lives than you going up against a horde. The encounters also don't really change much. Some have higher HP/damage, and there's a whole host of buffs/debuffs, but the only really noticeable one is health regen, which often just means the encounter is going to take twice as long as another. The difficulty curve is also kind of skewed, whereby early on you can seriously run out of resources and almost reach unbeatable situations where you have no life/life, but can't rest because you have no materials to build a campfire, and resting without a campfire almost guarantees you getting ambushed, which is a death sentence if you have no life/mana. Midway through, the resource issues go away, but there are still monsters that can kill you if you let your life/mana drop too low without resting. By endgame you're an absolute beast, mowing everything down with reckless abandon and barely seeing your HP or mana drop below 90% before instantly refilling mid-battle. This is super fun for the endgame, but could well deter players in the opening sections, which seems to have been the case judging by some of the negative reviews I read.
All told, it's a solid game at a fair price that gives a decent amount of entertainment but is not going to wow you once it's over. It's a shame there's no achievements, since its gameplay design is almost perfectly catered to them and might of encouraged some replayability, but a fun experience regardless.
