Dante’s Inferno for the PS3 & Xbox 360 isn’t afraid of pulling any punches, it knows who it’s target audience is and goes even further to pull them in the game by offering a simplistic combat system combined with responsive movements and hardcore elements; gore, violence and nudity, which may truly disturb some people (myself included, which I’ll discuss a bit later in this review). The visuals for the game are quite nicely detailed if not overly dark, making you wish some more light was shed on this but overall I found the game to be enjoyable along my journey through hell and look forward to more games based on the Divine Comedy.
A lot of people have compared it to God of War and to be honest they’re not that far off the mark. There’s a lot of things Inferno does that are similar to the GOW games but it also does a few things differently that helps distinguish it’s self from Kratos’ epic adventures.
Unless you know ‘The Divine Comedy’ you might get a bit lost within the story of Dante’s Inferno. I found however if you’ve managed to play a bit of Assassin’s Creed you might be able to understand more of the Crusaders and who some of the big wigs were during this time, whereas without it the game doesn’t give the beginning any context.
Short after the opening Dante is stabbed in the back as the Grim Reaper himself comes for Dante’s soul. After defeating Death, Dante returns home to find the impaled body of his love, Beatrix, as her soul’s dragged to hell by Lucifer. And here begins the game’s descent into being more enjoyable with a tale of love and redemption, as well as truly horrific creatures in stunning detail coming to give you a big hug and where the game presents a few changes to the hack and slash genre.
Dante has a scythe that he acquires from Death early on and a secondary attack weapon, a cross, that Beatrix bestows upon him. The scythe is your primary melee weapon while the Cross acts like a shotgun, sending out a holy cross across the level heavily damaging enemies all around.
Unlike in God Of War where you power up only weapons or magic, Dante’s offers a bit more control over what you spend your souls on but first, there are two sides to Dante, Holy and Unholy.
Holy has upgrades for Cross attacks and Unholy has upgrades for Death’s Scythe. To level them up you need to find crying glowing spirits, which as it turns out are some historical figures, and once you collect them you can Punish or Absolve them. Punishing them will kill them and damn their soul for eternity while Absolving them will activate a mini game which allows you to gain extra bonus souls, and free their soul to enter Paradiso. Upon levelling up you can spend those souls on magic spells, new weapon attacks, mana or health upgrades.
The mini games can ultimately be annoying especially since it slows down the gameplay to match buttons to the falling sins, and if you were to die after absolving them the game doesn’t autosave or create a check point, which I found out on a number of occasions. So instead you must go back to your last save or checkpoint to get to them again and most likely just punish them as it’s quicker.
Unlike every other game that has quick time events though this game gives you a slight heads up telling you when these events are about to take place, with the screen slightly desaturating. However the game sometimes doesn’t give you heads up with death traps, one such instance is when I was on an elevator that’s falling and suddenly I died, leaving me there with a “Wait, I was supposed to do something there?” look on my face.
Apparently I was meant to jump off as it passed an open corridor but the game gave me no indication of this and with the game being so dark it was hard to see the prompts pointing this out to me – which also showcases another problem with the game - it’s graphics.
The graphics in Dante’s Inferno are often too dark not allowing you to see alot of the levels clearly. I guess hell would be a hard place to explain sunlight though.
Saying that though, everything is beautifully presented with a slick 60FPS, highly detailed characters and monsters (some rather disturbingly so such as the Glutton creature and a certain someone’s penis.) Brilliant animation for all characters shine through as does great facial animation, although shadows upon faces can look a little messy. Some levels even have huge vistas, or just as big enemies which makes you wonder how did the team keep that impressive 60fps, with all kinds of visual effects, animation, detailed characters, sound effects, lighting and post processing without dipping in the slightest.
Don’t get me wrong the journey through hell is enjoyable; it just feels like it plays it too safe and therefore has a lot of missed opportunities. Such as having the player collecting coins that don’t do anything and down playing alot of moments that could have been truly epic, which ultimately makes the game feel like the developers were ticking a check off box or rushing rather then make a fun title. Saying that though I enjoyed my journey through hell and look forward to more games based on the Divine Comedy.
