Let's clear this out of the way now: yes, this game is almost a wholesale imitator of God of War.
OK, then. Let's move on
So like most games based on fourteenth century literature, Dante's Inferno takes many liberties with its source. For starters, Dante is now Crusader who fights off Death and steals his scythe. And he managed to talk Beatrice into getting it on with him by using the old "I'm shipping off to war tomorrow" trick. So promises are made, promises are broken and lo and behold, Dante has to travel through Hell to rescue Beatrice's soul. Truth be told, the story is kind of flat, and there isn't much in the way of plot development beyond the idea that you have 9 levels of hell to kill your way through to get back to Beatrice. And it's very hard to sympathize with Dante when the current predicament is entirely his fault.
From a design standpoint, Visceral Games was given a really great blueprint for level design since they basically used the poem as their design dock. The problem with that lies within what each of these circles are. Indeed they do a great job with Gluttony by creating a nasty, gastro-intestinal wasteland, but how do you visually represent Fraud? The answer is they don't. The game moves along quite quickly, and there were several instances where I passed through one of the circles and didn't even realise it because it was so indistinct and there were no stand out moments, whether it be a puzzle or boss battle, that indicated that area to be unique in some way. The levels are also inconsistent in their quality. The Violence circle is probably the most visually interesting, as well as containing some of the better gameplay and story moments, and then that is followed up by Fraud which is a mind numbing series of arena challenges, all fought on identical grey stone platforms. The only thing that breaks up the monotony of those 10 challenges is the method by which you have to clear the game from the save point on to the platform where the next challenge takes place. There was some good momentum coming out of the Violence section, but it gets killed completely by the repetition that follows
The combat is good for the most part. Dante has the exact variety of moves you would expect, and controls in the same fashion as most other games in the genre. What does separate him from the rest is the to weapons he has. There is the unholy scythe for melee attacks or the holy cross which creates a crucifix projectile that can kill off weaker enemies at long range, or just keep your combo going on the stronger enemies. Both of these weapons have distinct powers that can be upgraded by spending the souls that you collect from the fountains/chests scattered throughout the game, or by killing enemies. New skills and abilities are unlocked as you collect specific orbs to level up the holy or unholy paths by either punishing (unholy) or absolving (holy) the enemies. These orbs can also be gathered by encounters with shades. These are sinners that correspond to people that Dante meets in the Poem, whose sins are representative of the circle that they occupy. A word to the wise: absolving these shades leads to an extremely tedious button pressing mini-game which kills the flow of the game.
Probably the biggest sin (ha, get it?) of the combat is the cheapness of some of the enemies. All too often you will find yourself swarmed by smaller enemies that will quickly chip away at your health bar and prevent you from doing anything offensive leaving you to simply block and hope you can dodge out of the way to an open space. The game also has a terrible habit of locking you into a set combo animation which doesn't allow you to do anything to break out of it, which leaves you open to more attacks you can't do anything about, and dying in ways that you probably shouldn't. This is something that I didn't really experience in other recent games, so I wonder why it's left in this one.
On a technical level, Dante's Inferno holds up well. The frame rate stays smooth, and the music and sound design is generally quite good. There were a few instances of ambient voice work cutting out, but nothing so severe as to be game breaking. The worst thing about its presentation would be the compression of the cut scenes. Considering that I'm playing the game off of a bluray disc, I can see no excuse for the compression artifacts that are present in those scenes. Its a shame though, because the quality of those scenes is pretty high, and having them be marred by compression issues seems unfair to the people who made them.
Dante's Inferno is a decent romp. Nobody should look to this game to be setting any standards as pretty much everything that appears in this game has been done better by someone else. If all you demand out of a game is decent action with a few impressive set pieces, then you could do a lot worse. And if you want gore, sex and grotesqueness, then this is your game of the year. Otherwise, either get the sexy-librarian game from January, or wait for the pissed off bald guy in March.
