Reviews// Dante's Inferno

So, as we've established, the combat is not dissimilar to God of War. As well as your basic quick and powerful attacks, you've got projectile holy energy bursts (cross-shaped) to hurl at enemies, magic attacks that can be mapped to the face buttons and activated in conjunction with [R1] and 'redemption', which charges up in an energy bar and speeds you up when it's activated.

The combat is enriched by the option to upgrade your abilities using the universal hack 'n' slash currency – souls. You collect these by breaking enemies and breaking stuff. As you're going through this process you're levelling up – you can choose between going holy or unholy, though they're not mutually exclusive – to unlock new abilities and upgrades to purchase. These new goodies are rolled out at a good pace, so you're rarely left without at least a reasonably new toy to play with. It's all smooth and flows well and there's plenty of depth to keep you happy.

All the above abilities are used to smack around a delightful array of demon-types as you descend through Hell. This gets us to where Dante's Inferno really shines – in the shit-stained, evil delight that is the game's design. As Marcus pointed out, it looks like the sort of thing Clive Barker would invent if he had any imagination.

As I said earlier, I can't really compare it to all the nastiness Dante wrote about, but everything's delightfully vile. You crawl across the faces of the damned as you scale walls. The shaft of your great big scythe is made out of vertebrae. There are pot-bellied, Hell-stranded whores with tentacle cocks. Do you get the idea? My favourite thing about the game aesthetically: there are a lot of horrible tits in Dante's Inferno, but the worst flesh-sacks of the lot turn up reasonably early on a giant grey lady whose nipples open up so babies with knives for arms can crawl out. All this in glorious, well-realised HD.

While the combat is a jolly good time and it looks great, however, there are platforming elements of the game that can become tiresome. The design's solid enough, but the controls are a little too fiddly. As you descend between the various different levels there's a lot of rappelling to be done. For me, this meant a lot of plummeting to my death. Jumping off your rope just doesn't work very well, and I often found myself free-falling for no apparent reason. This sort of thing repeats itself as you progress.

There are also a few too many quicktime events. I don't mind the odd quicktime event and I don't mind having to hammer at one of the face buttons from time to time, but in Dante's Inferno it seems like every time you want to scratch your balls there's a quicktime event to do it. Visceral - it's OK for some parts of your game to just be cutscenes.

Oh, and there are puzzles. I say 'puzzles', but I mean 'bits of the game in which you move platforms about and pull levers. They're the sort of puzzles where you take the next action because it's the only thing you can do. So, the puzzles are there. They're mildly diverting. There's not much more to say about them.

Conclusion
All in all, Dante's Inferno is good. Not great, but good. There are a few things technically wrong with it and it certainly doesn't win points for originality, but it's good fun all the same. It's just a bit difficult to recommend it with all the similar titles floating around right now. Darksiders offers a more open world, more depth in the RPG elements and better puzzling, Bayonetta has better combat and is just straight-up more fun and GoW III is just round the corner for PS3 owners. You should buy this if you're either a) an Xbox 360 owner who wants GoW III but can't get it, b) someone who wants to like Clive Barker or c) someone just can't get enough of the hacking and the slashing. Or maybe if you're a goth.

SPOnG Score: 79%