Dante’s Inferno
Producer: Electronic Arts
Release Date: February 9, 2010
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action/Horror
“Go to Hell… Literally”
Written by Andres Caicedo
Dante’s Inferno is nothing short of what it really is, a God of War Clone. It’s very interesting to see how much marketing and money Electronic Arts pumped out for this game, yet didn’t fully deliver in the final process. While I wasn’t preparing myself for this game to be a record breaker, I thought it would at least take me for an enjoyable ride into the bowels of hell, and it did, if not for a while, but soon fizzled out at the mid/latter part of the game.
Storywise, it is based off the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, though very loosely based, as only some of the elements were borrowed from the book. You are Dante, a sworn crusader ready to fight in Holy Crusade’s to anyone that defied your religion (I’m presuming Catholic), while your wife Beatrice is worried deeply for your life in the battlefields. While the story isn’t anything really worth mentioning, it starts out strong yet fizzles out with crappy gameplay mechanics.
Now the gameplay is what makes this game average at best, it plays as a watered down God of War, and you definitely get the feeling that you played this game before. If you have played God of War, Onimusha, or Devil May Cry, you definitely know the type of gameplay this title is capable of delivering, and it’s a love/hate for some. You have a strong attack, and a weak attack which are your primary ways of attacking people. You can harvest the souls of monsters you encounter for points, as you have an “evil” and “good” bar you can level up. Every time you grab a monster, you have the option of punishing them, giving you evil points, or blessing them, giving good points, which add slight diversity to the types of attacks you want to do. Overall I found the use of evil more effective, as you are mainly using your scythe more than the cross power you begin with. The gameplay starts out strong and fresh, but after playing a good 3 hours, you really start to realize that it is a very repetitive process, as it can get really monotonous as well. Overall this was the weakest part of Dante’s Inferno.
While in Hell, you go through the seven deadly sins, and each one acts like a level. I loved seeing lust with all the prostitutes attacking you, as well as in Sloth where everyone was super fat and deadly, but once again it just got redundant and repetitive. The Level design starts out amazing at first, especially when Dante is just entering Hell for the first time, but starts to sputter out into a “kill monsters in room A, to advance to Room B; rinse and repeat.” While I admit that this was working alright in the beginning of the game, I started realizing that this was pretty much how the rest of the game was going to unfold. Really sad.
Overall, Dante’s Inferno had promises of being a good game, but didn’t deliver. What starts out as an interesting story and gameplay soon turns out to be repetitive and boring. I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone unless it came from the bargain bin. Beware; if you play this game, you will be bored as hell.