Dante’s Inferno is an epic release player, third-person action adventure game inspired by “Inferno”, part one of Dante Alighieri’s classic Italian poem, “The Divine Comedy.” Featuring nonstop action rendered at 60 frames-per-second, signature and upgradable weapons, attack combos and mana-fueled spells and the choice of punishing or absolving the souls of defeated enemies, it is a classic Medieval tale of the eternal conflict with sin and the resulting horrors of hell, adapted for a new generation and a new medium.
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Tale
The Italian mercenary Dante returns home from the bloodletting that was the Third Crusade to two pieces of soul-crushing news. The first is that although he was poised that he was absolved of mortal sins committed in the form of wartime atrocities in the name of the churches interests in the Holy Land, that is not in fact the case and his immortal soul is in grave peril. The second and more terrible is that his beloved Beatrice has been murdered, and her soul pulled down into hell by a dark force. Vowing not to accept the damnation of either souls, he gives chase, vows to get Beatrice back and descends into the infamous nine circles of hell. For weapons, he wields Death’s soul-reaping scythe, and commands holy powers of the cross, given to him by Beatrice.
Go to hell with Dante’s Inferno.
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Scythe Combat
To vanquish the foes you encounter on your journey owing to the hell of Dante’s Inferno, you must learn to wield Death’s Scythe with precision and deadly force. Mix light attacks with heavy attacks to make combos, then incorporate jumps and grabs to add another layer to your combat. With dodging and Holy Cross moves thrown into the mix, you can truly become a force to be reckoned with. Without using all of your combative skills and techniques, there is no hope of ever reaching Beatrice.
Holy Powers
During your journey, you may collect magic abilities for use against the legions of hell. When you go the Honest Path potential you make a dash attack and leave a trail of icy shards in your wake. With Martyrdom you sacrifice shape and mana to deal a heavy amount of hurt to surrounding enemies. Divine Armor regenerates your shape and protects you from hurt. Add these and other powers to your arsenal to vanquish all who stand in your way and when you need to replenish your mana-fueled abilities, visit the Holy Fountains scattered throughout the gameplay area.
Creature Taming
As powerful as weapons and magic are, sometimes surviving the perils of hell requires brute force. With the potential of Death’s Scythe, you are able to mount the beasts of hell and use them against your enemies. All of this, but, requires ridding the beast of its contemporary rider first. If flourishing, you will become the beast’s new master. Now use its awesome potential to pulverize enemies and complete tasks that require a beast’s strength.
Key Game Features
- Epic tale adapted from the first book of the Medieval Italian classic The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri.
- Nonstop action as you fight owing to Dante’s allegorical nine circles of hell.
- Wield the potential of Death’s soul-reaping scythe.
- Gorgeous quick-paced action and intense combat rendered at 60 frames-per-second.
- Choice-based finishes with enemies that allow players to punish the damned, or absolve them as they are defeated.
- Over 60 weapons, magic and combo upgrades and modifications.
- Huge destructive, ridable mounts that can be taken from defeated enemies.
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While it can be asserted that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it comes to huge marketing arcs backing an incredibly over-hyped game….yeah, it’s just rampant commercialism reeking of desperation bred by a straining economic market.
Dante’s Inferno does a number of things adequately; the frame rate is charming enough (and given the by and large amount of on-screen activity, this is tougher to pull off than it sounds), the combat mechanics are honestly intuitive, and the graphical presentation isn’t half terrible. The major conundrum is that this has all been done before, in the *exact* fashion in which it’s found in this title. While another recent game, that being Darksiders, chose to emulate a number of classic gaming franchises while giving them the respect they deserved, it by no means engaged in the blatant cut-and-paste mentality that hits you throughout every minute of this ‘experience’. Over the top kills, massive amounts of gore, repetitive and completely unnecessary nudity (a tired mechanic wherever it’s found, in my opinion; the Skinimax crowd should not be pandered to), creative/larger-than-life bosses, a pseudo-dark setting… Even the storyline, shallow and ripped off though it may be; every piece of this title has been done wherever else and executed much better, sans the boobies, IMO.
As if the insultingly unoriginal presentation wasn’t enough, its manufacturer has subjected the gaming community to a completely ridiculous amount of desperation-hype advertising, literally slamming this drivel down our collective throats; an insane Superbowl positioned ad was just icing on the collective ‘How terribly do you need us to buy this game?’ cake. The crowning bottom-out achievement of this title though? Selling various amounts of souls, the cliche currency used to upgrade your character as you progress owing to this mess, on X-Box Live Marketplace. This would seem to give you a method to ‘get a leg up’ on the game itself, although I would tend to feel that it would more so lead one to question why they were playing this thing in the first place. In person, I feel no further discussion is required for a go so thoroughly lame.
So for the DRM-loving moguls known as EA shoving a barely mediocre title owing to our collective eye sockets, a one star rating is basically standard in my opinion. The quick-flash blood, guts, and boobs crowd (this title’s obvious target demographic) will undoubtedly find much to like here, but if you’re an individual who demands much more than repetitive dross for their cash, there are a plethora of quality titles to invest in far removed from this unfortunate footnote in gaming history.
As always, just my opinion though.
Rating: 1 / 5
I reflect that the title basically summed up why I didn’t like this game too much.
Rating: 2 / 5
This game was splendid! The graphics are insane! The tale is very fascinating and the acting!! The Nudity is also a nice touch!
Ripping enemies apart is what makes it even more fun!
All you have to do is try the demo before you buy it, but I am sure you will end up getting it anyway!
Rating: 5 / 5
This game is so cool I like playing it, I bought it right when it came out and I couldn’t stop playing it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Part of the first quarter of the year is filled with massive sports meeting that nearly everyone’s going to buy with stuff like Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, God of War 3 or Final Fantasy XIII to be sure fire buys for many gamers, there’s the occasional in-between title that will act as a sort-of side game to work on when you aren’t busy with another game. So this week we have to highly anticipated Bioshock 2 coming out at the same time as this game, an action title developed by Gut Sports meeting, same dev team who made Dead Space, the Simpsons game and the Godfather game. How does the title stack up? Not well considering it’s sort of sandwiched between 2 sports meeting: the charming-as-silk combat found in Bayonetta and the PS3 mammoth that is God of War 3 and playing owing to Dante’s Inferno made me realize how much I miss Bayonetta as this game in person doesn’t feel polished or the least bit fun as so many annoyances bother me. Ever play a game that gets compared to another one but you realize the original was better just because of how better it felt compared to the other one? That’s what Dante’s Inferno was to me; a game that is inspired in places yet a game that stumbles way more times than it should.
Tale: Taking inspiration from the first book, “Inferno” by Dante Aligheri as part of his “Divine Comedy” poem, you control Dante, a warrior in the Crusades who comes across his dead wife, Beatrice only to have her soul spirited away by Lucifer right to the depths of Hell. So with the help of a huge scythe taken by Death himself, Dante literallys goes owing to Hell in order to save his beloved. Here’s where it gets fascinating: the tale in this game is in fact well told and the cinematics are quite cool so unlike Bayonetta where the tale was secondary to the combat, here it’s the reverse: I kind of lamented that I had to play the game itself in order to see the tale unfold. I’d rather watch someone else play this one.
Graphics: Dante’s Inferno is, no pun intended, cursed and blessed with the subject matter as the art team can go to town on the enemy designs and there’s some stuff that makes me marvel the mental stability of the individual. I’ll just say one thing: scythe for arms on a baby that crawl out of a nipple. I’ll leave it at that, rest you have to learn for yourself. Visibly the game goes crazy with the designs and there’s some messed up stuff. But this also means that the game gets unbelievably same-y after awhile and there’s only so many shades of dark red, brown and grey that it becomes slightly monotone; hell even some enemies can fade into the social class given the right kind of shade. Framerate issues are practically non-existant and like I said, the mixture of rendered cinematics and the eerie animation look splendid but the look of the game just feels so bland.
Sound/Music: What you’d expect from a game inspired by Hell: slashes, screams, belches and farts of all things and unearthly roars populate the sound mix but when there’s one sound I like: when you press RT near an enemy, you have an option to Absolve (save) or Punish (condemn) and picking the absolve option, one go is where you do a “mash B” event where you inch your cross closer to their face but once you win the event you hit their face with such a satisfying slam effect that it might listening to the overbearing soundtrack filled with “epic” choir and bombastic music more tolerable. Voice acting though is quite well-done and well the occasional line is spotty, I didn’t find it too be an embarassing voice acting job.
Gameplay: In my review I believe for Bayonetta I mentioned that there’s some combat systems you button mash and some you have to learn in order to really exceed. Well I button mash this one with the occasional block and unfortunately the combat was the first thing incorrect I noticed with the game. First of all I find the controls at times to be unreliable or unresponsive as holding Block when I wanted to in fact block the attack resulted in a hit anyway and just critical A didn’t result in a jump since it was like I nearly had to in fact press it more than once just to get him to in fact do the go. In a game where timing and keeping an eye on the battlefield is crucial, I find it poor that I can’t do a certain go whenever I need to and certain encounters were literally infuriating because dodging resulted in a hit anyway and enemies that do the social class blend mentioned above got a hit on me before I even realized they were going to attack. One cool thing about the combat is in regards to the holy/unholy options for go purchasing with unholy favoring outright potential moves while holy favors buffs such as finely tuned attack potential or shape upgrades. What this means but is you either have playthrough 1 doing unholy only which doesn’t have the shape upgrades and buffs of holy or vice versa or you have playthrough 1 being half and half where you don’t have any of the larger upgrades of the higher tier.
Dante’s Inferno in terms of other features are just as poorly implemented like puzzles that are either too simple or too vague that you feel like “how do you solve this anyway?”. There’s some platforming parts that are literally timed and you have to run your ass off only to not in fact know how to get owing to it and one part, the chains you’re swinging by the side of New-stylishness catch on fire where you not only have to jump before the fire reaches your hand but also time your jump so it passes by the occasional flame burst. Oh and occasionally you run into a lost soul that you can either punish or absolve and these are people like Elektra or Pontius Pilate so let’s say you want holy points and well you play a small mini-game where dragonballs (cause that’s what they look like to me) float towards a show of the face buttons and you have to time it so that you press the button as it reaches the icon. Basically a PaRappa the Rapper-type minigame but it’s incredibly flow-breaking, it’s dull but getting an upgrade that automatically does it doesn’t give you as much points so you’re nearly encourage to play it. A late-game gauntlet of challenges of the “kill x amount of enemies or kill enemies in mid-air” variety make it poorly positioned. At least Darksiders had it to brighten up the exploration, here it feels like “but we don’t want you to beat the game yet! Hm…I know! We’ll have them play small arena matches!”
Last month a game came out called Army of Two: 40th Day which was either a cool game for some but for many others it was just “eh, I’ve played better”. This to me embodies this game: sure it’s occasionally fun and I really loved the tale…but the more I played, the more complaints I lobbied at it. Do yourself a favor and get Bioshock 2, try out Aliens vs Predator next week but you need your action fix and you’re tired of Bayonetta or need a new action fix, go ahead but in person there’s other sports meeting are better cash buys.
Rating: 3 / 5