All is not right in Heaven and Hell. For a start, renegade angel Ryan Lennox has been banished to Earth for breaking protocol and now the Devil wants to recruit him to even up the balance of good and evil forces. Plus there's a suspicion that the Almighty may be planning to unleash a secret weapon that will affect Free Will...

So to prepare Ryan for his new role, The Devil fires him up with Infernal powers which include more effective weapon attacks, teleportation and special vision abilities. These powers are fuelled by mana which can be collected in a number of ways; defeating opponents, walking through mana stashes and keeping to dark or devilish environments.

Health is generated in a similar way, drawn from dead enemies or collected from specific sources. However, mana will decrease if Ryan comes too close to churches or light areas and of course he'll be killed if shot enough times or if he falls from a height of more than a few feet.

As this is a third-person shooter you don't have the immediacy of the first-person perspective, but Playlogic has gone all-out to make sure the graphics are as spectacular as possible, using a cutting-edge Ageia PhysX board. Yet despite this, the locations fall short of being truly spectacular. For example, the opening firefight against the forces of Light takes place in the narrow confines of a seedy nightclub, and even the 'draining of souls' effect (already explored in the Soul Reaver series) soon loses its excitement.

The gameplay should have involved massive potential destruction, seeing as the anti-hero has the powers of Hell at his command, yet only partial sections of the landscape are targetable. The weaponry consists of typical FPS military hardware ranging from pistols, assault rifles and flamethrowers to welder guns, rocket launchers and plasma guns. The AI on the whole is pretty stupid, so even with scores of enemies you can generally come though relatively unscathed.

There also seem to be many missed opportunities. Teleporting only seems to operate via line-of-sight and much of your time is spent looking for hidden switches, key-cards and buttons that will let you progress through locked doors and force-fields.

Ultimately, Infernal feels like a game that should have grasped its devilish courage in both hands and become a full-on FPS with destruction, effects and carnage cranked to the max. That way it could have done as much justice to its driving rock soundtrack as the much underrated, Hell-vs-Heaven action title Painkiller.

Only superior graphics technology prevents Infernal from dropping into the so-so shooter category, but the chance to try something truly original with diabolical new powers has been largely squandered.