Late Bird Reviews: Dante's Inferno
Okay, so if you know anything about this game and what it’s like, then you know that it is a mimic of God of War. I was anticipating the games to be similar but the gameplay mechanics are so close that referencing or comparing it to God of War in this review is unavoidable. In the end, will it be as good as the Sony juggernaut or will it have something else to offer?
Story
This is something of a ranting question, but why did the main character have to be Dante himself? Dante Alighieri was a poet who envisioned a truly morbid and grotesque form of hell that nobody of that time had ever thought of. But in this game they decided to make Dante into a crusader who somehow manages to commit all the seven deadly sins and be worthy of the nine layers of hell. The developers in their interviews were very confident that this was a great way to somehow skew history and make things more exciting while maintaining that this was indeed Dante’s Inferno. What they fail to realize is that they could have kept the title without making the protagonist Dante. They could have replaced the role of Virgil in the game with Dante if they wanted to keep him involved, or just called it “The Inferno” and used some random crusader for their protagonist. Instead we get a gimmicky main character that has been transformed from poet into pure evil crusader with a very simple goal.
The story of Dante’s Inferno is a simple one. Dante has left the love of his life, Beatrice, home on the family plot while he is away crusading and killing in the name of God. With some violent and disillusioning cartoons straight out of a Slayer music video, the game conveys that Dante, despite his so-called devotion to his faith and his wife, has managed to commit every sin possible throughout his life and on the crusade under the impression that he would absolved by doing “the lords work.”
Naturally, this is all a lie and Dante is destined for damnation and within the first five minutes of the game you are already pitted to a fight to the death against, well, Death. After besting the shadow and killing the thing that makes people die (no small feat), you take his scythe as your own and travel home, stitching more Metalocalypse scenes into the giant cross on your chest. Alas, upon returning, Dante finds his father with a gold cross through the eye, and Beatrice dead and topless out in the open fields. As Dante is struck with shock and sorrow, his mourning is cut short by a vision of Beatrice hovering over her body claiming that he has damned her. Before she can explain, an ethereal form of Lucifer pops up to drag her to hell; Dante follows the path, watches as a church crumbles beneath his feet and he falls into the inferno.
Along the way, Virgil “guides” you through hell. In reality, he just spouts of the scripture of the actual poem that describe the different layers you enter. This didn’t really feed or tie into the story in anyway; it just gave me a desire to read the poem and forget this cacophony of contradictions. Virgil didn’t write the epic poem or come up with the descriptions of the inferno, Dante did. Yet Dante is the fool who needs to be taught everything about hell.
Thus, you make your way through hell and occasionally the heavy metal cartoon kicks in to show how Dante has committed or been involved the sin corresponding to which layer of hell he is in. Often the boss of that particular layer is a well-known character of myths like Cerberus or Charon. Sometimes it’s a friend he betrayed or a family member who committed their own sin. Late in the game, a character important to the character, Dante, just suddenly appears as a boss and is defeated, never to be mentioned again; hell, she wasn’t mentioned at all prior to fighting her.
You may be asking: If Dante just continues to face all these sins he’s committed as well as comrades he’s betrayed, why journey deeper into the inferno? He’s doing it all for Beatrice. She was a pure soul whose only sin was believing Dante to be faithful and he is determined to save her, whatever the cost. This serves as good motivation for the protagonist, but the goal doesn’t change until the very end. Nothing changes throughout the game. The formula is repeated over and over, my only motivation to continue being curious of how f***ed up the next area is. Dante doesn’t really grow as a character in anyway. He seems naïve to the end, like everything that he’s seen so far is no big deal and that he has nothing to learn from it. Every layer he passes through, he pretty much ignores the lessons of that layer just to move on to the next. This was a fault of Kratos from God of War with just blind motivation pushing him on towards oblivion with no hope of learning anything. But at times, Kratos did show some depth of character.
There is a “twist” and a reason why Lucifer himself took such an interest in Dante, but they’re cliché and predictable. Ultimately, the story is forgettable. I actually played through most of the game on mute because I had more fun reading/ignoring the subtitles.
Gameplay
Gameplay is where Dante’s Inferno blatantly copies God of War. The button configurations are very similar and the “kill a bunch of guys then jump around and solve puzzles” style is close, even in the pacing. There are sections of fighting, sections of platforming, and sections that have the two mixed together spread out in a similar format; it’s that formulaic.
Even the fighting style of Dante seems like it fell out of a cookie-cutter for 3D action games. He swings the scythe around him wildly with weak and heavy attacks, creating a large perimeter and slicing opponents to shreds with large combinations of physical and magical attacks. Also, the breadth of his swings is about as large as Kratos, though Dante tends to move forward a great deal more with all of his moves. His over aggressive movement can often be problematic, leaving you open to attack.
In the platforming segments there are walls to climb, giants to ride, and gaps to swing over with your elastic scythe. There’s really not much to the gameplay that isn’t in God of War. Dante’s Inferno does a decent job with everything that has been done before, but if you’re looking for refinement, you won’t find it here. There have been plenty of moments where I feel that I died because the game failed to be clear or cohesive about what to do. There were cheap deaths from falling because I wasn’t prompted or poor camera angles. There were also enemies that didn’t seem any easier unless I employed my own cheap tactics.
There is plenty to upgrade in Dante’s Inferno. Though he never gets much of a repertoire of weapons to choose from, the upgrade page has quite an array that you don’t have much hope of filling out the first playthrough. The upgrades are limited to the souls you collect from killing enemies, choosing whether to absolve or condemn them, and “the damned” you encounter along the way. “The damned” are various people of history that sometimes are familiar names. They reside in the layers of hell that correspond to their crimes and you can choose to absolve or condemn them, yielding you a net of souls. As you collect souls you can upgrade slots on the page, however, you don’t have access to the bigger upgrades without increasing your levels through absolving or condemning. The side of the page that is measured by good actions tends to upgrade your attacks with your projectile cross attack, while the scythe is powered up by being cruel.
There are also “relics” that you find along the way, which are items that can be upgraded to assist you in combat. Their boosts range from decreasing the cost of magic to increasing the amount of time for the combo counter to restart. All of these elements of the combat and gameplay work relatively well, so long as you are frugal with your upgrades and searching for relics. There are plenty of places in the game that would be very difficult—even practically impossible—to pass without the proper upgrades and relics to help you through. When there are so many variables in progressing forward in the game, it makes the experience feel less balanced. They give you plenty of different aspects to improve but when it comes down to it, there are upgrades that are more necessary than others, making the variety pointless. There are actually moves that I wouldn’t have used in combat at all but proved to be the most useful in one of the toughest boss battles in the game.
All of these aspects of gameplay have been done better in the God of War series. However, the one area where Dante’s Inferno does a better job than God of War III is replayability. If you read my review of GOW III then you know that I was disappointed in how it chose to motivate players to go through the game more than once. Dante’s Inferno gives players plenty of achievements/trophies to go after, none of which are too absurd to accomplish, but there are so many of them that it would require multiple playthroughs. Trophies and Achievements aren’t disabled by any relics you find to assist you on your journey. But the main thing that makes the second playthrough much more of a pleasure is that you can go through the game again with all your equipment, moves, and spells completely upgraded. It’s simple why Dante’s Inferno did a better job at replay than GOW III: this game rewards you for wanting to go back rather than punishing you.
Players don’t want déjà vu when they play a game and have to go through the same experience again; they want to make the familiar experience more fun and to get some new experiences along the way. EA has since released some DLC for Dante’s Inferno that I haven’t played because I don’t have much of an interest in playing this game ever again, but I would say it’s not a bad idea for games as short as this. Though I don’t agree with charging for parts of a game that should have been there to begin with, I think DLC is a good way to bring players back to a game they have since put on their shelves and forgotten.
Presentation
This department is hit or miss for the game. The sound effects, music, and voice work are forgettable so I won’t waste the page with details on sound. I listened to everything for a little while then decided to mute the game mainly because none of it made me feel more motivated to play.The game is really about the visuals anyway. And what is there to see? Why, all of hell brought to life through the brilliant artistry of Wayne Barlowe! The team at Visceral Games got Barlowe to contribute some of his vision to the game’s overall look and they should thank him to no end. He is capable of bringing the horrific layers of hell into the most gruesome and foul form that most people would not be able to imagine, let alone design. Some of it may be comical to most players—like the numerous anuses on the walls spouting fire in the realm of gluttony—but it is nonetheless a very grotesque image that is fitting when talking about the place where gluttons are punished.
Anything that has to do with the conceptual look of the enemies and the landscape deserves a great deal of credit for the creativity involved. Cleopatra, as she climbed the , had unbaptized babies with blades for hands crawling out of her nipples that looked like tongues swirling about. You have to have a creative mind to come up with something like that and there are only other more shocking and nauseating designs throughout the game. Sure, it may seem excessive or gimmicky to have a bunch of phallic symbols in Lust but it is still appropriate for Hell.
However, this is only conceptually. The overall look of the game is not too great. The CG cinemas look good and realistic, but everything else looks quiet awful. Dante looks cartoonish during gameplay because his eyes are too big and white. The lip animations on him and almost everyone else look like a technique used in some Nintendo 64 games. Sadly, Dante is the character with the most physical detail on screen. He still has some texture to him and the little crosses that dangle on the flowing cloths attached to his wrists look alright. But when it comes to everything else, the textures are missing.
Cleopatra is one of the best looking bosses because she had some texture to her features and skin, but then you fight some other ones and they look like they were all dolls made out of plastic and left under a heat lamp for too long. Many of the creatures have a very glossy sheen and stretch in ways that look like a game from the previous generations. Even the background has little touches that make me scoff, like the animation of boiling blood or gold. In the liquid there are the damned souls drowning in it but it’s really nothing more than a 2D texture with flat people popping out then fading back into the goop. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the visuals of God of War III, but that game had landscapes just as big in scope and the textures on everyone (especially Kratos) remained impressive to the end.
Because there is polish in just some areas rather than throughout the entire game, and since there were plenty of spots where the game felt unbalanced, I am convinced that this was game was not entirely finished. It is still playable and the story is complete. The game is by no means glitchy, aside from the cheap deaths. It’s just that I think Visceral probably expected to be able to add a little more polish to the game for a few more months but had to adjust and release the game prior to GOW III to make sure it didn’t compete too much. Still a wise decision in my opinion, but it is a little disappointing that the brilliant concepts of Barlowe’s Inferno couldn’t look better.
