Hellsweep InfiniteMomentum Demon Shooter

Game overview

Hellsweep Infinite takes the old-school first-person demon shooter and swaps its arsenal and pace for those of a frantic 2D multiplayer shooter. Every gun is in play from the first minute, the standard ones never run out of ammo, demons die in a few well-placed shots, and so do you. You stay alive by moving: jet boots, momentum jumps, backflips and slow motion on demand.

When you die, you're back in the fight a moment later, and nothing you did is undone. The demons you killed stay dead. The only thing between you and the end of the map is how well you move and shoot.

It's a love letter to two games at once: Doom's hell and its demons, and Soldat's guns, time-to-kill and acrobatics, with Max Payne's bullet time and Unreal Tournament 2004's adrenaline powers in the mix. It's a small design on purpose: a combat overhaul, not a story.

Controls and interface

A first-person shooter on mouse and keyboard. The design lists the moves and powers; the key layout below fills in a standard arrangement for them.

The HUD shows the essentials: health and armor, the slow-motion meter, the adrenaline meter, and the powerups in your pocket. The two guns you carry need no ammo counter, only a magazine; the special weapons show what they have left.

Game layers

1. 01 · Moment-to-moment

   Seconds-long fights

   

   A room full of demons, two guns, a grenade or two and a pair of jet boots. Fights are decided in seconds, because both sides die fast. You read the room, pick your angle, fly, flip, slow time for the one moment that matters, and keep moving.

2. 02 · Low metagame

   One map, cleared

   

   A map of hell to sweep from entrance to exit, room by room. Every death drops you back in without resetting anything: killed demons stay dead, opened doors stay open, and the map only ever moves forward. It ends when you reach the exit, and how many times you fell on the way is just part of the story.

3. 03 · High metagame

   Kill hell. All of it.

   

   The design is a combat overhaul and leaves the maps open, so this layer is a gap filled the way the design's title points: hell never runs out. The combat works on any map built for it, handmade or generated, so there's always another stretch of hell to sweep. The crew's war is the overarching goal, and it's never finished.

4. 04 · Practical game flow

   A map a sitting

   

   A map is a sitting of a quarter of an hour or so. Pause anywhere and save whenever you need to stop; since death never rewinds, a save is only ever a bookmark, never a safety net.

Game modes

There's one way to play: drop in and sweep the map. The design has no separate modes, difficulty ladder or score attack. The demons' numbers and the map decide how hard a stretch of hell is.

Features and mechanics

1. The heart of it

   Every gun, from the first minute

   The whole arsenal is in play from the start. You carry a primary and a secondary, the way Soldat does it: you begin with a random pair and a few grenades, and swap either one for whatever you find on the floor, since every weapon pickup is random too. The standard guns keep their original character and never run out of ammo; you only reload.

   Weapon	Slot	How it fights
   Twin hand cannons	Primary	Semi-automatic, two shots at once
   Flurry SMG	Primary	A fast flurry with a wide spread
   Burst rifle	Primary	Fast bursts
   Battle rifle	Primary	Slow and steady
   Marksman rifle	Primary	Semi-automatic precision
   Combat shotgun	Primary	Loaded shell by shell, wide spread, pushes hard
   Grenade thumper	Primary	One shot, one instant kill, dangerous up close
   Anti-materiel rifle	Primary	A slow, long-range shot that pierces
   Squad machine gun	Primary	The middle ground of automatic fire
   Minigun	Primary	Relentless spray that pushes and stuns
   Sidearm	Secondary	A quick finisher
   Knife	Secondary	An instant-kill stab, or a throw that flies back on its own or waits to be picked up
   Chainsaw	Secondary	Carves through crowds or one big target, if you dare get close
   Rocket tube	Secondary	A huge blast, a very slow reload, fired only crouched on solid ground
   Flamer	Special	A short-to-medium range fire hose
   War bow	Special	Semi-automatic instant kills; blast arrows make it a faster, longer-range grenade thumper
   The emplacement	Special	A brutal heavy machine gun, the top of the arsenal, with limited piercing

   The special weapons are the exception: limited ammo, and found at the map's one fixed pickup, which hands out a special weapon with a full refill. Grenades come in two kinds: a timed frag for groups at close range, and a cluster bomb that splits into five in its direction of flight, in the air or on impact. Every weapon can also melee, and the knife and chainsaw hit harder when they do.

   

2. Fast both ways

   A 2D shooter's time-to-kill

   

   The weapons are tuned so that the mid-tier demons, the horned knights, spider-walkers and bloated flame-gunners, die as fast as a player does in Soldat. Everything below them is chow. The war bow takes a demon lord in one hit and a titan in four.

   Every gun hits at full power up to a set range and weakens past it, and every shot is a real projectile you can lead and dodge, except the minigun's instant spray.

   You get the same deal. You have 100 health, and armor is rare: a green vest absorbs 90% of the damage until 200 points of it are spent, a blue one until 500. A stimpack heals half your health and a medkit all of it.

3. Movement is armor

   Jet boots, flips and momentum

   

   With so little health, standing still is the real danger. Every soldier wears jet boots that recharge on their own, and moves with Soldat's acrobatics: jumps that carry and build momentum, boosts off a jump, backflips and going prone.

   The heaviest weapons ask you to stop: the rocket tube only fires crouched on solid ground. Choosing when to plant your feet is part of the fight.

4. Two gauges

   Slow motion and adrenaline

   Slow motion is an ability you switch on whenever you like, the way Max Payne does it, and the design's focus is on using it well: one heartbeat of slowed time to land the shot that matters. It runs on a meter filled by health vials and by ammo pickups, which give you either slow-motion juice or a grenade and also reset your weapons' cooldowns.

   Adrenaline works like Unreal Tournament 2004's: kills and armor shards fill it, and a full meter buys one of four powers for a while:

   1. RegenHealth flows back
   2. SpeedFaster running and higher jumps
   3. FlightThe jet boots never run out
   4. Fire rateEvery gun shoots twice as fast

5. Use them when you choose

   Powerups in your pocket

   Powerups don't fire the moment you touch them. Every one goes into your inventory, and you decide when it's worth spending. Their durations are longer than in a 2D shooter, to fit the size of a demon fight:

   Powerup	What it does
   Shade	A shimmering blur that makes you hard to see
   Soul flame	Burns hot with stolen life, overcharging your health
   Untouchable	Invulnerability for a while
   Heavy	Heavy armor plus the emplacement gun, the big one
   Night eyes	Night-vision goggles for the dark places
   Hazard suit	Protection from lava, slime and poison
   Berserk	Six times the damage for 30 seconds
   Plasma pack	A backpack upgrade for 300 seconds: every weapon fires plasma shots with an area blast and three times the damage

6. Nothing un-happens

   Death is a detour

   

   You respawn endlessly, and the map never resets. The demons you killed stay dead, the doors stay open, and the next soldier of the crew picks up where the last one fell. There are no lives to count and no checkpoint to replay.

   That's what lets the fight be this lethal. A shooter where both sides die in a few hits is only fun when dying costs you a moment rather than ten minutes, so the danger stays in the fight and never leaks into your evening.