Neon Inferno is a feast for your eyes and ears wrapped around a gameplay core that doesn't quite understand what made its inspirations timeless
Neon Inferno is one of those games that immediately catches your attention before you even start playing. The second the opening screen hits, the pixel art explodes in vibrant colors, the synth-heavy soundtrack kicks in, and your brain goes, “oh yeah, this is going to be cool.” And honestly, from a presentation standpoint, it really is. The art direction is phenomenal. The lighting, particle effects, explosions, all blend perfectly with the classic run-and-gun aesthetic the game clearly draws from. It's a love letter to the 16-bit era, packed with cyberpunk flair, mechanical beasts, and exaggerated action. The sound design is equally on point, with heavy guitar riffs and punchy electronic beats that pump energy straight into your veins. Everything about how this game looks and sounds screams style.
But once you actually start playing, that's where things begin to unravel.
Neon Inferno borrows heavily from classics like Metal Slug, Contra, and Cabal, but it struggles to recapture what made those games so enjoyable. Those older titles managed to balance challenge and flow in a way that always felt fair. You could die a lot, sure, but you always felt like it was your fault, not the game's. In Neon Inferno, however, the difficulty crosses over into the realm of frustration more often than not.
You can play as one of two assassins working for The Family, moving through a futuristic New York which has basically become a raging war zones, blowing up mechs and cops while dodging an onslaught of bullets. The twist here is that you can also aim into the background, similar to Cabal. Enemies come from both planes, forcing you to juggle between shooting in front of you and behind you. On paper, it sounds like a cool evolution of the genre. In practice, it feels punishing. Every time you stop to aim into the background, you become a sitting duck for the hundreds of bullets flying from the foreground. You're constantly being hit by something off-screen or from a weird angle. It's chaos, but not the fun kind.
The game's weapon system also makes things worse. In the classics it draws inspiration from, weapon pickups during a level were part of the excitement. You'd grab a flamethrower or rocket launcher and suddenly feel unstoppable, even if just for a few seconds. That little dopamine hit kept you pushing forward. Neon Inferno removes that joy entirely. Instead, you buy your weapons from a shop before each level. Once the level starts, that's it. There are no pickups, no temporary power boosts, no health items. If you burn through your ammo, too bad. You're stuck with your weak default pistol for the rest of the mission. And when that happens, every encounter turns into a slog. It gets even worse cause these weapons are really expensive and unless you get a great highscore, you will not be able to afford them. And trying to get a highscore is a whole other story.
There's a dodge roll and a parry system that theoretically lets you deflect bullets back at enemies, but both feel awkward in execution. The parry window is tiny, and the sheer number of projectiles on screen makes it nearly impossible to rely on it consistently. Dodging helps, but enemies attack from every angle, and often from the background, so you're never truly safe. The end result is a constant feeling of being overwhelmed rather than empowered.
That's the thing that really hurts about Neon Inferno. It's a game that looks and sounds incredible, yet feels at odds with itself when you play it. The developers clearly wanted to capture that old-school difficulty curve, but somewhere along the way they forgot what made those games feel rewarding. The combat lacks rhythm. There's no moment of release after the tension, no moment where the game lets you breathe or feel powerful. You just die, respawn, and do the same dance again, hoping this time the chaos tilts slightly in your favor. It also has a two player co-op mode and although I appreciate it being in the game, the gameplay gets even more chaotic as you there's like double the amount of bullets flying at you, so yeah, good luck trying to survive that.
It's not that hard games are bad. Difficulty can be deeply satisfying when tuned right. But here it often feels like the game is working against you rather than challenging you to master it. Every mistake feels like the result of clunky mechanics rather than your own shortcomings. And when that happens repeatedly, the frustration builds fast.
Still, I can't stress enough how much I adore the presentation. The pixel art is jaw-droppingly good. The character animations are fluid, the explosions are dense with particles, and the environments feel alive with color and detail. The soundtrack matches that energy perfectly, creating an audio-visual punch that could go toe-to-toe with the best indie action games around. If you just want to admire how good 2D games can look in the modern era, Neon Inferno absolutely delivers.
Unfortunately, that presentation isn't enough to save it. The gameplay loop just doesn't hold up over time. The lack of pickups or mid-mission rewards kills momentum, and the punishing enemy design feels more like busywork than challenge. There's potential here, and I could see future updates smoothing out the balance or adding more power-ups to break the monotony, but as it stands, it's a stylish shooter that's more frustrating than fun.
In short, Neon Inferno is a feast for your eyes and ears wrapped around a gameplay core that doesn't quite understand what made its inspirations timeless. It's gorgeous and loud, but it forgets that the best run-and-gun games make you feel like a badass even when you're about to die. Here, you just feel punished. So while I loved looking at it and listening to it, playing it left me cold. Unfortunately,I don't recommend this game. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a PS5 via a promo copy provided by the publisher. Neon Inferno will be available on PS5, PC and Xbox on November 20th 2025.
