Game Reviews

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno

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Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno

There's a trend at the moment for turning already established IPs into endless-runners of one sort or another. Some, like Rayman Jungle Run, work exceptionally. Others, like Die Hard, are less successful.

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno sits much closer to the second of those camps. It takes Rayman's level structure and lush looks, but fails to polish the final product to a high enough sheen, leaving you with an occasionally entertaining diversion that's too often spoilt by poor design and strange decisions.

Rabbit stew

The game casts you as a hellbound rabbit intent on revenge. You have a jet-powered motorcycle and a large calibre pistol to aid you in your quest for blood. Pushing on the left of the screen engages your bike's hover engines, and tapping on the right blasts out a bullet.

You're always moving forwards, so it's up to you to weave through the simple mazes the game presents you with, shooting demons, grabbing floating coins, and completing the three challenges each level sets you.

Each level is a simple case of getting from A to B. If anything sharp or explosive touches you you'll die, and have to go back to the start, but the levels are small enough that that's never really a concern.

Completing all the challenges is another matter. Some are simple enough, like collecting a set number of coins or killing a set number of monsters. Others are a little trickier, and you'll need multiple play-throughs with different weapons to get them all.

Seventh circle

The different weapons are bought with the coins you pick up. They don't come cheap, though, and after the first couple of upgrades you need to either backtrack or spend some real-life cash if you want to make progress.

In all honesty, though, it's likely that by that time you'll have had enough of the game's somewhat limited charm. It's a frustrating affair, and while dying is expected in this sort of game, many of your untimely demises seem unfair and unjust here.

There's nothing original about Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno, either - a fact compounded by a series of boss battles against different characters who all repeat the same attack patterns.

Throw in a strange aura of incompleteness and you're left with a game that's average at best. Fans of the series might get more out of it than the rest of the world, but even they're going to find a surprisingly flat experience.

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno

A poor relation of its bombastic console kin, Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno is worthy of a minute or two of attention, but nothing more
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.