WARNING! There might be tiny spoilers in this review.
I've finished this mod yesterday. I think this was the first time since playing the original Inferno back in the 2000s - of which I had no fond memories. If I remember correctly, it has nothing more to offer than absurdly large warships and a total lack of any story.
Regarding gameplay, music and assets, this is a top quality mod. I've found a couple of flaws, for instance many radar signs (e.g. for fighters or the Arcadia) have black boxes around them, but that's not really hurtful. The most major thing I've encountered was that
Bellum Se Ipsum Alet was kind of broke: the "opening fire" messages from the Vasudan ship played repeatedly and the debriefing showed the same or similar paragraphs repeatedly. It was not mission-breaking, though. Overall, these are child diseases which are okay for an initial release. Regarding gameplay, I'd recommend adding hull repair and the AI could be a little better at avoiding collisions.
Overall, the technology shown in this mod, the ships and weapons feel like a believable extension of the development we have seen between FS1 and FS2, although I felt like there was a little too much stuff, particularly regarding the weapons available to the player. It might just be a question of getting used to, though. The ship models are all awesome and a beauty to watch, putting the fact aside that some of their designs simply don't meet my personal aesthetic preferences (that Bastion thing is so god-awfully ugly, man!
) - big thumbs up to the asset people there!
The music, while admittedly not mind-blowing to me, was well put together and presents an organic composition. Do I hear the Fury 3 soundtrack in there? I certainly recognized the rocket launch sound.
The voice-acting was awesome! I totally liked the Command VA. I personally could not distinguish between real voice actors or AI voice actors, and even if I'm absolutely not against using AI voice acting. I should, eventually, try it out for my own mod at some point.
Unfortunately, the campaign has one big weak point and that is the story and, tightly connected to that, the general mission design. This is the same problem I have with the
Exile and
Shadow Genesis mods: taking vanilla-style missions and inflating their runtime to 20-30 minutes does not improve anything. In fact, it's quite the opposite, at least for me. Length neither creates epicenes nor excitement. It creates monotony. Sitting there and blasting wave after wave after wave of capital ships to pieces for 30 minutes is not interesting.
Now I'm not against having long missions, though I generally see little reason to go beyond the 10-minute mark. Good reasons to do so are interesting character dialogue, world building or - most importantly, perhaps - story development. I was very disappointed to find out, however, that none of these things happen in Inferno.
Characters were kind of there at the beginning, but after a couple of missions your wingmen turn into main campaign type non-personalities except that they have a name. But that's not a big problem to me, actually. Not that I'm against good characters but that's not the reason I play FreeSpace. The biggest problem I had in that regard is that nobody seems to be particularly bothered about the destruction of the Ramayana. I mean, that's the ship we were stationed on? Tens of thousands of our friends and colleagues die and all the reaction we get is "Let's raise a glass"? Hell, even I'm more emotionally in real life and I'm schizoid.
What bothers me more is that we learn next to nothing about the world these people live in. This is a very long campaign and throughout it we learn almost nothing about the Earth Alliance, it's internal structure, it's goals, or motives, except that it seems to be some kind of space-commie dictatorship that starts a war because... why not? I mean, yes it was mentioned that the EA wants immediate reunification with the colonies, but why? What's so important about that that you start a war? What is all this about? We know just as much about this after 32 missions than we already knew after three.
In fact, the final mission is a good representation of all that. This mission is a whopping 35 minutes long and of those the first twelve feel completely redundant. This first part is simply a generic vanilla-style escort mission which has nothing extraordinary to offer. You could completely skip this part and start in the debris field right away without missing anything. Searching the debris was more interesting, but ultimately presents little progress either. We already knew that Ross 128c was devastated and we already suspect that it probably has something to do with a new weapon developed by the EA. The only point where it really gets interesting is the final 5 minutes, but again we don't really learn anything but stop at getting teased.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that every mod has to re-invent the wheel. My own mod certainly is no masterpiece when it comes to creativeness or writing or mission design or whatever. But its 2025 and I think we have to offer more than simply extending what we already had in 1999 to 30 minutes. In that sense, Inferno stays far behind its potential. And that is very, very sad for a quality project like this that shows so much determination in pretty much every other aspect. The team behind this visibly put a lot of hard work in this and I whish more of it had gone to world building and story.
