Dante's Inferno Review
There's no shortage of hack 'n' slash games that have already appeared on the market this year but none have been quite as shocking as Dante's Inferno, both in build up and in content. It's not the biblical haven and hell that sets this game apart, instead it's a fifty foot naked Cleopatra with mouths for nipples that spurt demonic unbaptised babies and an achievement for killing said babies.
To give a little context; Dante's Inferno is an adaptation Dante Alighieri's poem "Divine Comedy", in which Dante journeys through the nine circles of hell and encounters various figures from myth and history banished there, such as the aforementioned Cleopatra in the circle of lust. That's as far as the original story goes and the hack 'n' slash adaptation steps in and inserts a typical video-game story of save the girl and kill everything in your path. The story still works rather well and many of the characters from the story appear as boss battles or as souls that you have to absolve or punish for their sins.
Souls are used as currency throughout the game to unlock holy or unholy abilities once you level up by absolving or punishing both souls or creatures. This method of levelling up has some issues, as instead of allowing the combat to flow freely you are encouraged to decide the fate of foes by grabbing them and performing a quick time event. This can be rather tiresome when there are a couple of handfuls of smaller enemies on the screen. The combat system itself otherwise performs okay but the available upgrades are lacking and only take the form of a new combo, ability or an increased health/mana bar with sadly no additional weapons to explore. You are able to return for another play through with a character import to see all the available skills and tougher difficulty to help extend what is otherwise a six to seven hour game.
There are some definite problems when it comes to difficulty levels, sure it scales the challenge of the creatures you face but it fails to adjust anything else, meaning that the easy mode will have laughable easy hordes of enemies and bosses but still have equally as frustrating puzzle and platforming sections. Some sections involving gratious use of timed switches are memorable for all the wrong reasons with their the brutal timing and instant deaths, leaving the easy setting a mess and a problematic rollercoaster. The creatures that you face gradually become easier to defeat as you unlock new powers and get used to the attack patterns of the sparse variety of different attackers. You'll see the environment change into a new landscape but the lack of variety really comes through at the end as your participate in ten combat arenas against the same assailants as you've been fighting all along.
Dante's Inferno may be doomed to its own pit of hell due to its timing and it's a hurried release to appear before Sony's God of War III behemoth. There are some things to be enjoyed here in the twisted retelling of an already twisted story, but as a hack 'n' slash game released in 2010 it manages to be average at best.
Originally posted to CitizenGame.co.uk on Feb 27, 2010
