Dante's Inferno

[BobTD]

Genre: Third-person hack and slash, action-adventure

First impressions:

The first question I would ask Dante:
"When did sewing that ribbon into your chest seem like a good idea?"

I feel like this is an important place to start with a game (the first impression). I know you are not supposed to judge a book by a cover but lets face it, sometimes the media will try and pass a game off for something it's not. Fear not! This game is exactly what it looks like. Whether or not that's a good thing, I will let you decide.

First let me say that I played this game the day after it came out, thinking it would be a platforming game with environment-based puzzles loosely trying to cash in on the success of the God of War style of hack and slash with buckets of gore. And it hits pretty close to the mark. However I made the mistake of expecting more relevance to classic literature and that did nothing but let me down.

So I must point out that if you went and got a bright shinny gilded edges hardcover copy of “The Divine Comedy”, (like a certain brother of mine), you will find that this game is not an adaptation of cultural classics, but an intellectual property (IP) with such weak ties to the book that if the character wasn't named Dante and the girl you went after to save wasn't Beatrice then we might as well call it the adventures of Mario in hell!

But onto the adventures of Mario... I mean Dante!


Gameplay:

Yes your character is an unreasonably remarkable badass. Who somehow defeats death and steals his scythe. This weapon is apparently the explanation for most of the game because everything you do seems to revolve around it. You need it to open doors, slay your enemies and even hookshot across gaps in the level. (what, you didn't know that deaths scythe was a hookshot?) You have a cross as a weapon as well, that for some reason has magic holy powers but that somehow was explained even less than why death was such a pushover with the worlds largest swiss army scythe.



You have the option of absolving or punishing enemies to progress down the holy path or the un-holy path. You get souls based on finishing moves or simply grabbing the weaker enemies with your scythe and choosing how you want to finish them. This is done with button mashing or a simple quick time event. Once you figure them out they don't change. There are a lot of quick time events just like GOW, and finishing bosses is satisfying to accomplish. The boss fights are the only really diverse part of gameplay.

If you played the demo you will have an idea of whats about to happen, the entire game plays just like the demo with your boss fights scattered about. You ride giant creatures and rip apart your enemies in a very Kratos fashion. But you will notice all that punishing and absolving doesn't leave a satisfying amount of blood on the floor. Sure, you are surrounded by rivers of blood at times but they way you dispose of enemies quickly becomes simple grind with an occasional challenge (the enemies you can't just grab and absolve instantly).

I will give the first 20 minutes of gameplay props though, during that time when I felt cool for doing all the finishing moves on enemies. Unfortunately, the most common enemy (that isn't so weak you can instantly grab and destroy them) are a race of goat men, satyr, you know the goat men that we all loved from the Diablo PC games? Yeah those guys are the standard infantry of hell and you can kill them with 4 finishing moves. While you move through hell they upgrade and get stronger, but you will end up doing those same 4 finishing moves a few hundred times. The appeal wears off. Trust me.



I did want to mention that when you die, you have no penalty, you just respawn at the entrance to the last room or before that cliff you fell off (you loose your indifference to height after the grand entrance). And when you die you get some Modern Warfare nostalgia with the random bit of text to keep you company while it loads. All the text is pulled right from the Divine comedy as well! Good thing that Dante's works are public domain or they would have to pay royalties...

Play this game on the normal or easy setting. You can, and probably will, beat this game on a higher difficulty but you wont like it. You will find ways to break it over your knees so thoroughly that it won't be fun. I am, of course, talking about the completely broken air juggling you can do with a scythe. Once you figure it out you will end up relying on it to get you past all the hard parts and pretty soon you start to wonder why Dante can fly.

Tip: you might not realize right away, but you can talk to the poet more than once each encounter for new dialog. He actually just hands you artifacts for talking to him, because he gets lonely. I was actually pretty annoyed by missing that the first play through. You carry over all your skills as well as artifacts so collect them all. You can easily fill both un-holy and holy skill trees.

Sound/graphics:

The sounds and sights in hell aren't actually that bad. Your entry is just like in the big commercial they played for the super bowl. You pretty much just find a big giant hole and jump into hell. Its all very well done and I was surprised at how they managed to make it semi believable and not leave you wondering if they officially put hell in the center of the earth, or if at some point your character died and just didn't realize it. Lets just say its very cinematic.

Oh semantics...

Who cares how you found the front door to hell and why it was 50 yards from your house.



I just tried to appreciate the flaming bodies falling from the sky in the first part of the game. That was my favorite. And the ambiance of screaming souls. Unfortunately, at some points its hard to hear dialect in the background with all those people suffering. But they seem to work that out later in the game.

Not much can be faulted visually with the game. It is a third person platformer however, so it leaves you wondering what the other walls look like at times, as you only feel like you can see half the level. Watching your characters mouth while he speaks can get a bit silly at times as well. He looks like he is trying to copy the “batman voice” from Dark Knight. I don't know how you could hold your lips like that and still speak straight.




Ending thoughts:

I have been very hard on this game. And I'm surprised by that. The game is exactly what I expected and yet I'm angry at myself for buying it right when it came out. It's not even a very long game. Then they have the gall to plan extra content right away that probably should have been included. (the “historical” Dante costume was very poorly done as well, and I hear the UK gets a Dead Space costume- wooooo...)

The game did not do anything groundbreaking. Actually it gave you soul points from breaking boxes at a few points. My head just about exploded contemplating the implications. I think the problem I have is taking the game too seriously. The makers obviously had a lot of fun making phallic towers and motion capturing their kids for the demon babies. But there is nothing new or exciting about the setting of hell to most gamers. And this seems to be their idea of the big selling point.



Recommendation:

Try before you buy. This game would make a great rental. But don't get a new copy if you expect to spend a significant amount of time for your money.

Random Praise:
I was not expecting the penis tower. That caught me off guard, props. Also Dante was a decent anti- hero, he falls well short of being your perfect hero cliche.

-BobTD (thanks for reading)

[jango]

a couple of typos here and there (but we all make those), but on the whole an enjoyable read .. +rep for the effort bud

personally i'm still not massively convinced by the game, but hey, each to their own ..

[Shixx]

Good Review.
I was very disappointed with this game.
In every way.

[Muffincat]

Great review. I have been too repulsed by the fact that they tried to make a game about the Divine Comedy and that it would probably not actually have anything to do with the book at all that I refused to play it once I heard about it...glad to know I'm probably not missing much.

[BobTD]

Yes I probably could have done a bit more proofreading. Probably should have taken you up on your offer. =P Cant believe I put "holly" and not "holy". Lol, that's what I get for typing something up at one in the morning. Did some proof reading today. Mostly fixed.

Thanks for the comments and crit. once I get system figured out for reviews I hope to do a bit of improving.

[younging94]

BEATRICE!

Nice review too.

[Project Blaze]

I was at Gamestop and considered buying it.. but, I decided not to and got a different one. Glad to see that I made the right choice. I was really hoping that it would have something to do with the Divine Comedy, it would have been an excellent idea for a game just to have something different. So that's a gargantuan letdown. Like MuffinCat said: glad to know I'm not missing much.

[Frank-the-Rabbit]

Thanks for the review! I had already decided to just rent this or wait till its very cheap but you helped me solidify that choice.