Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno Review

At times I wonder if the incomplete release of a game is the result of hubris on the part of the developer, or a genuine lack of time to bring the pieces together. In any case, no matter how intriguing your idea may be, if it can't stand on its own two feet it's going to have a rough time in the hands of even the most casual of gamers. Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno is SEGA and Polm Studio's attempt at boiling down the Console and PC release of 'Wrath of the Dead Rabbit', but instead of a gorgeously hand-crafted platformer with Metroidvania-lite aspects, the end result is something far more bland.

You ride a bike. That bike can fly with a touch of a button as you automatically side-scroll through the many 'hell' themed stages. Oh and you can shoot bullets. Thus begins a monotone quest on the part of the player to collect coins, fulfill arbitrary objectives that rarely push you off the basic path, and to shoot down 'bosses' in an attempt to continue the cycle once again.

Not long after getting your bearings with the two-button control of jump and shoot, you're introduced to barriers you can't pierce through - at least not until you upgrade your gun. Grind your way through coin-littered stages, or push on through the content as it unlocks and you'll be granted the option of going back to previous stages to complete minor objectives for the sake of it. There's no real satisfaction in the achievement as you spend over 90% of your time earning the right to complete what is a trivial task of shooting yet _more_ enemies and barriers; no puzzles are solved (aside from the occasional dead-end path) and the experience never deviates.

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno simply cruises along, hoping its quirky style and painfully annoying catchphrase of 'ASH FOR THE RESCUE!' will push you in to one more stage to see if something changes... but it doesn't.

While 'Hell Yeah!' may be a potentially fertile franchise on the console, the iOS version has crashed and burned.