I stumbled across Asmodev's Steam page a couple of months ago, and thought their games looked... Unique. During a sale, a bundle of most of their games was like 5 dollars, so I took the plunge. I do love supporting indie developers, and let me tell you, it don't get much more indie than this!
Infernal Radiation, Asmodev's first game, is an action-bullet hell-rhythm-RPG, where you go around exorcising demons via two-button combat. You can attack and block, with a cooldown, and timing this so you block the enemy's projectiles and counter-attack is the name of the game. Of course, if you hit either of them before you're supposed to, it makes an Atari noise and locks you out of an action for a brief period, to keep you from button mashing.
These fights are pretty entertaining once you get the hang of it, but the RPG elements cause a problem here: rather than being tuned for a specific rhythm, being able to put points in cooldown reduction, attack power, etc makes things sloppy, like your block running out before the enemy's salvo of projectiles has actually completed, meaning you need to block again, and then you might not have time to attack before their next attack starts. Or, if you aren't putting any points into reducing their speed, you simply will never have time to attack at all. Once defeated, enemies are gone, so you can't grind them for XP, though you do get XP for each attack landed, and you keep it after a death. So you can continue banging your head against a boss to get some progress, but there's no respec function so it's very possible to completely fuck yourself over with bad skill point allocation.
There are quite a few strange decisions like that. You can get holy water of various types, which can reduce the enemy's mana, make your attacks cause more damage, or poison them. You want the poison one. That's the only one worth using, because it gives you free damage and bypasses the enemy's shields (sometimes they can only be damaged once you have a certain combo level, and poison ignores that).
There are also incenses and prayers you can buy. Incenses, though seeming like consumables, are actually permanent buffs. There is only one vendor who sells the best incenses, near the end of the game, and so once you get to the last boss and have money for them, you'll have to walk back to her. Not a long trek, but a weird decision.
Prayers activate certain effects when their words have been spoken during battle. As far as I can tell, this is random. Both incenses and prayers can be sold back for the same amount you paid for them, so you can experiment freely. This makes it even weirder that you can't respec skill points.
The story is... Interesting. You're on an island where a nuclear generator blew up, and that radiation has apparently empowered the forces of satan to possess everybody on the island. You eventually discover the source of the explosion, which is maybe the single most bizarre part of the game (and that's saying something), but at the end I'm not sure what most of this was actually about. The dialogue consisting entirely of broken English didn't help, but you can still get the gist of what people are saying.
Infernal Radiation took me about 2 hours to beat, and it can often be had for One Doler on sale. You can do a lot worse. It intrigued me enough to continue my journey through the Asmodev Gameography.
5/10
Infernal Radiation, Asmodev's first game, is an action-bullet hell-rhythm-RPG, where you go around exorcising demons via two-button combat. You can attack and block, with a cooldown, and timing this so you block the enemy's projectiles and counter-attack is the name of the game. Of course, if you hit either of them before you're supposed to, it makes an Atari noise and locks you out of an action for a brief period, to keep you from button mashing.
These fights are pretty entertaining once you get the hang of it, but the RPG elements cause a problem here: rather than being tuned for a specific rhythm, being able to put points in cooldown reduction, attack power, etc makes things sloppy, like your block running out before the enemy's salvo of projectiles has actually completed, meaning you need to block again, and then you might not have time to attack before their next attack starts. Or, if you aren't putting any points into reducing their speed, you simply will never have time to attack at all. Once defeated, enemies are gone, so you can't grind them for XP, though you do get XP for each attack landed, and you keep it after a death. So you can continue banging your head against a boss to get some progress, but there's no respec function so it's very possible to completely fuck yourself over with bad skill point allocation.
There are quite a few strange decisions like that. You can get holy water of various types, which can reduce the enemy's mana, make your attacks cause more damage, or poison them. You want the poison one. That's the only one worth using, because it gives you free damage and bypasses the enemy's shields (sometimes they can only be damaged once you have a certain combo level, and poison ignores that).
There are also incenses and prayers you can buy. Incenses, though seeming like consumables, are actually permanent buffs. There is only one vendor who sells the best incenses, near the end of the game, and so once you get to the last boss and have money for them, you'll have to walk back to her. Not a long trek, but a weird decision.
Prayers activate certain effects when their words have been spoken during battle. As far as I can tell, this is random. Both incenses and prayers can be sold back for the same amount you paid for them, so you can experiment freely. This makes it even weirder that you can't respec skill points.
The story is... Interesting. You're on an island where a nuclear generator blew up, and that radiation has apparently empowered the forces of satan to possess everybody on the island. You eventually discover the source of the explosion, which is maybe the single most bizarre part of the game (and that's saying something), but at the end I'm not sure what most of this was actually about. The dialogue consisting entirely of broken English didn't help, but you can still get the gist of what people are saying.
Infernal Radiation took me about 2 hours to beat, and it can often be had for One Doler on sale. You can do a lot worse. It intrigued me enough to continue my journey through the Asmodev Gameography.
5/10