[7/18/2010] Dante's Inferno

[Devia Eleven]

 

* Electronic Arts

* Visceral Games

* Beat-'Em-Up

* Release: Feb 9, 2010 »

* ESRB: Mature

 

Dante’s Inferno is a down-right in your face hack and slasher for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PSP. Developed by Visceral Games, the story is labeled from Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, involving the adventures of a Templar, scythe wielding knight, Dante, as you travel through Hell to obtain the tortured soul of his lover Beatrice from Lucifer.

 

The game tells a story in a matter of in-game cutscenes, along with simple cartoons in-between major events, told from within the sown cross on Dante’s chest. Dante’s Inferno’s lineage is instantly encountered upon the first hour of gameplay. Many reviewers have inevitability compared this game to the God of War series. Bound with a Death Sythe, a Holy Cross, and about four main magic attacks, Dante does not contain much versatility in weapon choice. However, like most hack and slashers, the player has the ability to upgrade his weapon to obtain new combos, health, mana upgrades, and attacks. Revolving around the devil, religion, and repentance, depending on whether or not you decide to either, absolve a withered soul, or punish it, brings your powers into consideration.

 

 

For instance; you have two vines beside your health bar, one blue, one red. The red vine has around five different thorns, which signifies different unlockable levels of attacks that can be upgraded, and will otherwise show up as faded unobtainable ones. The blue vine does exactly the same. Absolving a soul accrues “holy” (blue), points, which fills your blue vine. The opposite vine, simply the opposite. Most powerups in the Holy category deal with powers that have to do with your Holy Cross, and the red powerups deal with just about everything else. However, absolving or punishing a character more than the other doesn’t necessarily make you evil or good in particular, so there’s absolutely no reason to stay exclusive to any side, since you need both Holy and Undead powers to get the job done at hand. There is no justice system, it is purely experience based.

 

 

Once an enemy has suffered enough damage, you can press the trigger button to initiate a finisher, similar to just about every other hack and slasher within the last decade. Once this finisher is activated you will have the choice whether to punish or absolve a monster. Absolving involves sending them to Heaven, before this can be achieved, (and everytime you decide to do so), you will have to play a mini-game, where you collect their sins. The more sins you collect, the more soul points you accumulate for your “holy” vine. The mini-game works on a cross which is represented by the four face buttons, once a sin flows over your button, you’ll have to press the button in time to collect that soul, much like the, “Guitar Hero”, system, and once more sins are collected, the faster the sins will move, at the end of sending them to Heaven, the experience points you receive is based on how many sins you collect.

 

 

Punishing a character just gives you all of the experience points after a gruesome insta-kill. Working more towards describing the gameplay in general, this game borrows just about everything from God of War, whether unintentionally, coincidentally, or intentionally. There is a hit meter that counts the amount of hits you can land without getting hit, or not hitting something for too long before the meter resets. The more combos you can pull off in a chain of dance steps, the more experience points you can gather. The enemies themselves are irritating, seldom challenging, unfair, overpowering, monsters that get in the way most times than not. Much like God of War, some rooms require you to rotate a lever to raise a platform or whatever the case, but you can’t do this while demonic bats, zombie gypsies, and axe wielding minotaurs are trying to attack you. So instead of killing all of the enemies, and then pulling the lever uninterrupted, the game forces you to balance, killing off enemies, and pulling the lever, (in the time that the enemies are re-spawning), which gives you about three seconds of lever pulling. Once the lever is let go, the platform goes back down slowly, so if you try to pull the lever and kill monsters you’ll end up right back to where you were before.

 

 

It also doesn’t help that the game allows the player to fall in pits of lava that just happen to be around the little land of mud and dirt that combat is taking place on. You can push enemies into the lava to save all of the boundless combat, but sometimes you’ll end up falling in there with them. For some odd reason, while participating in airbone battles, an enemy can barely hit you while in mid-air, you’ll automatically fall in the lava. You don’t even have to be remotely close to it, as the game gravites you towards death.

 

The game strictly operates on cryptic, uninteresting puzzles, at just about every single moment after defeating a mob of enemies. It also incorporates random death traps, and bottomless pits, (this game loves bottomless pits), that you would not otherwise carefully notice without dying in a place more than once. The wall climbing from ropes contains some death traps, like trying to swing a rope to get from point A to point B, while there are fire trappers, blowing fire at you, trying to kill you whilst it happening. Not to mention the random things that happen, the game says, (this platform is going to lower at a fast rate, and without warning you’re going to die). The player will often question, how was I supposed to know this was going to happen? The platforming is abysmal, with Dante’s heavily uncontrollable sporadic jumping animations. In combat the hit detection is slurred, and there’s no camera control at all, (unless I overlooked the options menu).

 

The boss fights have really grotesque character designs, and interesting voice acting, that are all faltered by obscenely repetitive boss battling structures, with unfair instances of, (there’s no way that hit me), because visually it didn’t, the game just said it hit you. Dante is a sentimental warrior who is cascading through undead monsters, and even his relatives, just to get to Beatrice, for of what that seems completely futile. Some parts of the game force you to take control of a gigantic monster, (by impaling it's forehead, another God of War trademark), which is also broken, you have to climb walls and navigate numerous stages with these large incompetent beasts that provide nothing intriguing.

 

 

The quick time events are the major downfall of this game, they are completely terrible, only considering boss fights. The game requires you to be able to consistently predict when these button prompts are going to appear. Quick time events were never appealing to me, not in Resident Evil 4, not in God of War, not in Uncharted, they do nothing for me except aggravate the suck out of me. This game gives you two seconds to press the right button, or, the right thumbstick direction for this matter, and if you don’t, you’ll die, and instead of coming back to where you were, you go back to the beginning of the boss fights. Some of these boss fights have parts in-between you kicking the actual bosses’ butt, where you fight his or her little minions and these guys have the potential to tear you apart. Blocking and invading are in synchronization, but there’s a delay between evading and blocking, a one second vulnerability that most enemies exploit. Considering most of them have long range attacks, shields, and fast paced dodging the Dante wasn’t built to endure.

 

The graphics themselves are filled with dark brown, fiery red and orange scenery, with extremely disgusting, but also brilliantly created character designs. The structure of this game would stupendous if the God of War series just didn’t exist, but ironically without God of War existing, this wouldn’t either. Dante’s Inferno is God of War’s less attractive, less keen, and less socially engaging brother that not many people tend to prefer.

 

* Story: 7

* Gameplay: 6

* Graphics: 7

* Controls: 7

* Sound: 8

 

7.23

[Agozer]

Judging by the review and the score, your sorta kinda tolerate it despite some very moronic design choices from the developer's part. In regards to the combat system, I also remember reading somewhere that while doing a combo, you can't block until the combo has finished --> Dante is left unceremoniously under attack during combos with no chance of defending himself. Is this true?

 

Also, supposedly the level and enemy design is marvelous in the beginning, but also descend into mediocrity the further you go. Any truth in this claim?

 

Oh yeah. Having to do a puzzle/rotate something while enemies respawn around you ad infinitum makes me RAEG. I remember there being one such instance in God of War II and it wasn't too bad, but developers really shouldn't resort to such choices.

 

 

 

 

Good review, no doubt about that.

[Devia Eleven]

Judging by the review and the score, your sorta kinda tolerate it despite some very moronic design choices from the developer's part.

 

Yeah.

 

 

In regards to the combat system, I also remember reading somewhere that while doing a combo, you can't block until the combo has finished --> Dante is left unceremoniously under attack during combos with no chance of defending himself. Is this true?

 

Yes.

 

Also, supposedly the level and enemy design is marvelous in the beginning, but also descend into mediocrity the further you go. Any truth in this claim?

 

I didn't pay attention enough to notice any drastic difference as the game progressed.

 

 

Thanks for reading my review.

[emsley]

Also, supposedly the level and enemy design is marvelous in the beginning, but also descend into mediocrity the further you go. Any truth in this claim?

 

Same here.

[L.S.D]

The combo can be interrupted with an evade.

 

but yeah, basically Dev's review is spot on, having played the watered down version on PSP myself. Initial stages are brilliant but it is getting mundane as you progress, no enemies variety, story seems weak, and the overall feeling is it tries to be GOW but fail.

[Minuous]

I still much prefer the Commodore 64 version, I don't know why they have to ruin a great game by "remaking" it with 3D rubbish etc.

[Devia Eleven]

The same can be said for every game that was fine in the past and did not necessarily need some remake.