As the retro gaming boom continues, we’ve seen virtually every genre from early consoles and the arcades make some form of comeback, whether it’s Shovel Knight’s NES-flavored platforming or the full return of fighting games following Street Fighter IV’s success.
Neon Inferno (from Zenovia Interactive) fits neatly into this picture, a frantic run-and-gun that bears enough resemblance to its forebears that you could have sworn you’d seen it at the corner of your eye at the local pizza shop, its 16-bit sci-fi dystopia looping on a worn-down cabinet. That déjà vu will only intensify the first time you fire a bullet that grazes the pinky toe of a pixelated bad guy, killing them instantly as they dramatically take a spill. At this point, you’ll probably say, “Hey, this is like Metal Slug. I like Metal Slug.”
However, while it risks emulating its visual and ludic inspirations too closely in what could be seen as a flagrant bid for nostalgia, its lively pixel art, hair-trigger gunplay, and small innovations allow it to establish its own identity—one where you use hot lead to trim the pompadour off a gangster’s noggin. Does the game aggressively dabble in pastiche? Sure, but it’s the good kind that understands and builds on the core appeal of its influences.
Set in the Big Apple in the year 2055, you play as either Angelo Morano or Mariana Vitti. They’re cleaners for the mob, foot soldiers in a turf war against corpos, cops, and rival crime syndicates. As you can probably guess, their job involves blasting a bunch of guys.
If you’ve fed quarters into any number of brutal shoot ‘em ups, you’ll feel at home with the basics here. Jumping, shooting, and ducking are your central actions that you’ll use to weave under slow approaching projectiles and ice bad guys. However, on top of this, you’ve got some other helpful options in the form of a double jump and the ability to perform an invincible roll to avoid shrapnel and gunfire alike.
Beyond those straightforward options, there are a few more complicated ones that define Neon Inferno’s moment-to-moment particulars. First, there’s your laser sword. This can be used to quickly take out enemies at close range, but can also be used to reflect incoming bullets (specifically ones that are marked green) to their sender. If you hold the melee button after successfully striking something, you enter a slow-mo bullet time where you can precisely aim where this redirected projectile will go.
Then there’s the game’s most defining feature: the ability to fire into the background or foreground like a gallery shooter. While you’re always moving on a 2D plane, enemies don’t always play by these same rules, forcing you to rapidly switch dimensions as you avoid death from all directions.
While this approach, where there can be enemies all around you, risks turning into sensory overload, it’s all just barely parsable in a way that’s quite exciting. As you quickly change between shooting into the background and foreground with different button presses, it creates a frantic feel that mimics the brain-scratching sensation of something like Ikaruga, as you alter firing modes to deal with each new threat—in short, it’s supremely satisfying. It’s as if the gallery shooting sequences in Sunset Riders got more of the spotlight, with the seamless transitions between these styles very literally adding an extra dimension to the experience.
The game’s quick pace, which extends from dodging bullets from all directions, is justified by the snappy controls—play this one on the fastest monitor you have. Additionally, a lineup of defensive options helps you navigate these challenges, like double jumps and the all-important roll maneuver.
That said, while you have the tools to succeed, you will almost certainly get positively perforated on your first few attempts. The Hard difficulty very much lives up to its title, and even the Medium option doesn’t mess around.
Thankfully, while the level design and boss fights give little space to catch your breath, they’re engineered with enough gaps that, with enough practice, you’ll be able to navigate these bulletstorms. The bosses are memorable and unique, forcing you to utilize some combination of shooting into the background and foreground as you memorize telegraphed patterns. And while the game’s relatively straightforward core loop of shooting dudes might have gotten a bit stale after bagging your eight-hundredth small-fry goon, thankfully, there are chaotic vehicle segments that have you switching lanes as you avoid civilians and turn police cruisers into smoldering ruins. While these kinds of gimmicky areas are often a nightmare in many dedicated action games, here they’re just as well considered as everything else.
All that said, perhaps what best ties together all this carnage wrought against bodyguards in mech suits and SWAT teams who dropped in from Warhammer are the visuals. This game has some of the prettiest pixel art seen this year, so much so that it may briefly tempt you to read into a story that doesn’t have much going on. From the idle animations to the detailed hellscape you shoot your way through, there’s genuine artistic craft as it channels the dumb, juvenile gun blasting antics of ‘90s arcade games.
On the one hand, while Neon Inferno very much falls into the greater trend of thoughtlessly mimicking the aesthetics of Blade Runner without forming any deeper connection to cyberpunk fiction and its anti-corporate themes, it’s all presented in such a cartoonish package that it largely gets away with this. While there were irksome elements, like how the main heroine’s fanservice-oriented outfit felt out of place, and some moments where self-serious prose clashes with the maximalist visuals, the game’s art style and setup establish more than enough of a vibe to support its shoot ‘em up thrills.
Although Neon Inferno is ultimately limited by its arcade sensibilities, with a short runtime and a generally familiar structure, it largely nails its homage, mitigating some of its superficiality with pixelated mayhem that will keep you entranced. Like its points of inspiration, it understands how to grab your attention and keep it with brutal challenges that will test your dexterity, as you face off against giant robots, the police, and that time when you felt really bad because you accidentally blew up a civilian’s futuristic Honda Civic. You may have already seen much of what this one has in store, but it executes this classic template well enough that you probably won’t mind.
Neon Inferno was developed by Zenovia Interactive and published by Retroware. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available on PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
