Dante’s Inferno is the first game I bought for my new PS3. I decided to buy the PS3 after my TV set-top box died in a puff of smoke and pre-ordering the limited edition Pandora’s Box God of War 3 (GOW3).
Dante sets out on a rescue mission to save Beatrice, but he soon realizes he is also in Hell to face his own demons and ultimately to redeem himself
~ Electronic Arts
It started with a dark scene of Dante sowing and tapestry of his sins to his chest, dying and eventually throwing the player into a fight against death as Dante rejects the idea of being claimed for the underworld. All guns blazing so far and leading towards the main thrust of this review (and what many other people have said also): this is an extremely well-made clone of God of War. I imagine they worked very hard to get it out the door before GOW3, since after it releases Dante’s Inferno will be a vague gesture in comparison. It is to GOW3 what Torchlight is to Diablo 3: something to pass the time until the real thing comes out.
After the first boss fight there was a bit of a lull as I realised how blatantly and absurdly this resembled GOW. Not just resembled but copied EVERYTHING:
- The way you get health, mana, experience from shrines.
- How you start in a sectioned off area to fight a certain amount of lesser minions before doing anything.
- Save points being statues.
- Finishing moves on creatures.
- Being caged in and area until you kill everything.
- The rage bar that increases the more you kill.
- Too many more to list here…
As a whole Dante’s Inferno feels like the studio got the source code for GOW2, re-skinned it, bolted on a couple of original, though poorly implemented, ideas and pushed it out the door.
Taking into account the “game” is GOW, all they have up their sleeve is originality and tapping into the richness of the original Divine Comedy poem. This shouldn’t be hard given that the poem is a blueprint for the entire landscape and Gustave Doré’s etchings provide explicitly graphic scenes already thought-out and rendered. The game picked up in this respect during the first four areas (three circles) of hell: Purgatory, Limbo, Lust and Gluttony were fantastic and had awesome bosses. Kudos for the harlots that attack you with deformed vaginas. The City of Dis was very scenic and fun to smash through. But as one progresses the originality plateaus and eventually becomes non-sensical as you fight no new enemies in certain circles and instead fight enemies from previous areas – disappointing.
One original idea was the levelling up system: awesome, moral choice throughout the game… Ha! No, no we’ll have none of that! Even worse than it having no bearing over anything asides for which particular attack weapon you want to level up first it does not work even function properly as the reward system is biased. If you punish one of the whimpering characters you come across during the game you don’t get the extra souls that you get by absolving them and playing the Beats for a minute. And during a fight punishing enemies is usually quicker and more effective in battle than absolving. Given that EA are charging for souls in the Play Station Store it is unlikely that any intelligent player will parse moral judgement on the characters properly as one is out to get the souls to level: i.e. absolve. This completely breaks this game mechanic and the whole premise of the game allowing the user to pass judgement. Perhaps, like other parts of the game they ran out of budget to create the punishment mini-game *snort*.
From about the 5th circle till the battle of Lucifer the game looses traction and becomes a bit repetitive. Once you get to the Desert of Burning Sands the quality of cutscenes and polish of the levels really diminishes. The Fraud circle is completely laughable and stupid with ten clunky challenges that reeked of incompleteness. Thankfully, once you pass this you are through the worst part of the game and it can only get better – though not to any new highpoint unless you got off on seeing Doctor Manhattan’s enormous wang.
Dante’s Inferno had the potential to trump the God of War series by being darker, more hardcore, and more full-on but it fails. This game is worth the play but I would borrow, rent, or buy it cheap.
