There are many first-person shooters that deal with blasting away the demonic denizens of hell, but there aren't many with a Russian flavor to them. Hellforces is such a game, though, and Russian publisher Buka is working with Orion to deliver this shooter later this year.

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　　The story in Hellforces has your character battling soulless zombies that have been possessed by demons from a parallel world. The zombies are the result of experiments by a biophysicist who extracted souls from human bodies to serve as a power source. However, things got out of control when a demon-possessed zombie opened a gateway to hell, allowing Lucifer himself to enter.

　　Hellforces will require a fair amount of system power (Buka says that you'll need a 2GHz Intel CPU or an equivalent AMD processor), but the graphics engine should have the expected amount of eye candy that we've come to expect. The game takes advantage of DirectX 9 graphical features, and there are destructible environments, advanced lighting and shadowing, and all sorts of distortion and refraction effects. Physics and physical effects are modeled in the game as well.

　　You'll have plenty of different enemies to shoot at, with a huge arsenal of weaponry to choose from. The game itself consists of six episodes, containing five sections each. It's not all run-and-gun, though. Buka says the game does have its humorous moments as well. Hellforces is scheduled to ship sometime this year.