I love the classic beat ’em up genre, and the storytelling that comes from the smallest of details. That’s why I was very interested in seeing the retro sprite art style and the way it shows off its art design of Neon Inferno. The art and the trailers it displayed caught my attention instantly.
Game Name: Neon Inferno
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Zenovia Interactive
Publisher(s): Retroware
Release Date: November 19th, 2025
Price: $19.99
Neon Inferno has you in the shoes of Angelo or Mariana as mercenaries. You get cases that will bring you against three factions: The Yakuza, The Police, and a third faction called Pangeans. You will receive cases and go after objectives in each level. Each case ends generally in a big boss fight.
The Good
The biggest thing I noticed in Neon Inferno is the charm and personality in every visual aspect of the game, including the sprites, the guns, and the cyberpunk dystopian setting. The color scheme is a darker palette with bright colored highlights. The bullet effects are also easy to read as they have a variety of colors based on how you need to react to them. Green bullets or grenades can be deflected back at the enemy, red ones can’t be, and rainbow-colored bullets and grenades are explosive area of effect that cannot be deflected.
The controls in the game are nice and simple. There is a button to shoot your gun in front of you. You can also change directions of where you are looking to aim the gun that way. There is a separate button you can hold down to aim your gun into the background or the foreground of the screen. You will need to look around and find where the enemies are located.
Neon Inferno has local co-op, and playing with a person is a real treat, as you can have both Angelo and Mariana as characters in events and cinematics. Not a lot of games have local co-op anymore, so it is nice when we do get that as an option. That makes Steam the must-own platform for this game; however, as there is no online co-op
The Bad
While Neon Inferno doe feature co-op, it’s restricted to couch co-op. However, since I reviewed the PC version of the game, I was able to get around it by using Steam’s Remote Play feature. However, that has its cons as you are beholden to the internet connection of only the host, and your experience can vary. It would be nice if you could have online co-op as a peer-to-peer network that allows both players to have some kind of control. When getting into some Remote Play co-op sessions, the game was smooth on my end, but every so often, the frames would dip heavily for the other player. During the final boss, things got really dicey as the other player’s frames tanked to the single digits.
There are some moments where boss fights don’t really utilize everything as well as it should. Some spam rainbow bullets and doesn’t let you use your deflection skill at all. Others will have only green bullets, as you are constantly deflecting.
Some stages feel like gauntlets, and other stages where you have a ton of checkpoints. It made me wish that Neon Inferno had a lives system or at least a way to heal up your health. Nothing was more annoying than when you got to the end of a difficult miniboss but got killed off by a random enemy that made you have to redo the whole encounter again.
Final Verdict
Neon Inferno is a pretty solid shoot ’em up experience that has a lot going for it, design-wise. It would be nice to have more guns you could buy or learn to use, as well as bosses that were made to help you utilize everything you learned, but overall, I would recommend it.
Neon Inferno is available for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Review Disclosure Statement: Neon Inferno was provided to us by Retroware for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.
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Summary
Neon Inferno is a blast. It has a lot of enemies you can shoot at, and with good visual design, you can understand how to react to everything on screen.
Pros
- Playing through the stages is a blast
- local co-op
- Visual design is fantastic
Cons
- No lives system or healing
- A small number of things you can buy
- no online co-op
