- Divine Edition Box Art - EA
So recently EA and Visceral Games have decided to work on their own rendition of a game heavily inspired by the epic poem by Dante Alighieri, Dante's Inferno. I've had the good fortune of being able to pick up this game and play through most of it. Don't worry, there are no spoilers to worry about in this article.
This game has extremely disturbing images, many of which are unfitting to be described in this article. The ESRB has given this game a "Mature" rating, meant for ages 16 and up. This game has heavy sexual undertones, rampant nudity, generous amounts of gore, and many other disturbing images.
The Story
Dante's Inferno is heavily inspired by Alighieri's poem, however it is not simply a retelling of an old classic. As any gamer could imagine, simply sitting through a tour of the nine circles of hell would be excruciatingly boring. So, naturally, the story for the game was written with the basic plot of the epic poem in mind, whilst adding a slightly more interactive way of experiencing it.
The basic plot of the game follows the character Dante Alighieri who, apart from the name, is nothing like the poet. Dante is a crusader during the Holy Crusades, and is promised that this crusade will cleanse him of all his sins. Dante quickly finds out otherwise and rushes home to his fiancee, Beatrice, who he discovers upon arrival to be murdered.
With but only a few moments to grieve, Dante witnesses his love dragged to hell by Lucifer, or Satan, and when presented with a choice on what to do, he decides to chase after her, realizing that it was his fault that she was going to end up in hell. And so Dante descends through the nine circles of hell in pursuit of the soul of his dead lover.
Gameplay
This game had almost nothing original in terms of gameplay, mostly because the lead level designer for God of War 2, Michael Cheng, also led the level design for this game. The lead level designer works closely with the lead game designer, and is responsible for the overall feel of the gameplay, according to Gamasutra's job description..
While the color palette was on the less saturated side, the levels were still visually unique from each other. Though the gray tones did tend to sort of blend together, obscuring the fantastic details of each level, the hints of color that are there definitely do stand out. Of course, it doesn't help their case when they had to make anything of interactive interest glow brightly just to tell it apart from everything else.
Combat wasn't much better sadly. Early on, combat consists of mashing the light attack button repeatedly to perform the only real combo you start with, although that does improve over time. What doesn't improve is the repetition of monsters. While each level certainly has unique monsters, those monsters all move predictably. Combat ends up coming down to "Press X when he does Y".
Quick time events seem to have become a staple of these games, no matter how annoying they are. This game brings quick time events to the same grinding pace given in God of War, which is basically "Press X to not die." The reason this game mechanic is terrible is that it changes these moments from fun into memorization of button sequences, which is perfectly fine for playing Simon, but less so for these games.
The Final Verdict
Despite all of these flaws, this game is extremely fun. While it's certainly not the most original game to come around lately, it's not a bad game, and worth buying, although it does seem rather unfair that the Divine Edition is only available on the PS3.
8.5/10
Brandon Milligan - My name is Brandon Milligan, I'm 21 years old, and I was born and raised in Wisconsin, United States. My first real writing experience was ...
