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Genre: Third-Person Action Publisher: Electronic Arts Developer: Visceral Games Players: 1

By Keith B (11th Feb 2010)

There must be something in the air. As they say with buses, you wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or two, although you get my point. Dante’s Inferno is the third button-mashing title to arrive in a little over a month, and it has some tough competition to do battle with.

Based on the Dante Alighieri epic poem The Divine Comedy, where Dante travels through the three realms of the afterlife – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso – the material offers the chance to create some truly warped realisations of each of the deadly sins, a route which is central to the game’s story. In Dante’s Inferno, Dante undertakes the work of the Church in leading the Crusades, killing and maiming as the crusade marches across the world. Upon his unforseen demise, Death arrives and sentences him to eternity in Hell, a move which horrifies Dante as the bishop that sent him forth promised that as they were doing the work of God, there would be no ramifications in the afterlife. Dante refuses to accept the judgement, kills Death (as you do) and takes his scythe, and then dives into the underworld to search for his beloved Beatrice, who was taken to Hell for losing her soul on the belief her Dante would remain faithful while he was away.

It provides a suitable launch pad for designers to go crazy, because the parameters set by the source material are vague. So right from the outset, players are presented with a vision of Hell that writhes and screams. Lakes of fire or boiling blood are coupled with routine bosses that take the form of the seven deadly sins, so the realm of gluttony, for example, is filled with sphincters bursting forth fire, and worms that erupt from the moist ground beneath your feet. There are so many little touches here that add weight to the locations you’re fighting through. A lake of fire not enough? Okay, how about a continual rain of burning bodies, screaming as they fall, to make it come alive? Done. Or perhaps the gold idols located in the greed level aren’t quite what are needed. Let’s stick people writhing and crying out while being tormented in a sea of boiling gold? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Dante’s Inferno is incredibly dark, and not only in its locations. As Dante delves further through the nine levels of Hell, his own life unravels in small, well-drawn animated sequences. As his perspective on previous actions is challenged, you realise that through ignorance (or perhaps blind devotion) he has committed terrible acts in the name of the church. His selfishness, exploitive nature, and bloodlust gradually turn our hero into something else. Something that’s not quite a hero.



Populating these nightmarish regions is an army of enemies, but as is to be expected, the roster is pretty small. Each enemy has a general weakness and routine patterns so it doesn’t challenge too much. Adding life to it are the many puzzles which must be tackled to allow progress, often based on pulling levers, moving boxes, or swinging through the air. The puzzles are all pretty obvious in presenting the solution, but they do the job. The fixed camera angle, and lack of incessant screen tearing, immediately removes two of the problems which beset Darksiders, one of this title’s main challengers. While the camera being fixed means that there are but a few moments where the path forward is unclear, it does make finding the various collectables that bit harder. This is an issue because there are over 40 special items to collect which boost combat, so to miss a few because the predetermined camera doesn’t make it easy to find can be intensely frustrating.

Occasionally, Dante will come across one of 27 lost souls in the underworld, and must choose whether to absolve them of their sins, or to punish them. This leads to accumulating points for the Holy and Unholy tech tree, but unfortunately is handled by a quick time event sequence. While that’s not really the end of the world, it never changes from start to finish, so while bearable at the start, it’s downright annoying after a short time and I would guess most people will simply punish to avoid being punished themselves with more QTE moments.



Combat itself is pretty standard, with the usual collection of strong and weak attacks, magic, and ranged attacks. The combat never reaches the peaks that Bayonetta scaled in terms of combo action or sheer slickness. On the other hand, the massive range of powers available on both the holy and unholy tech tree, with progress based on whether you punish or absolve the many lost souls you encounter or defeat, tries to provide some depth. These are the crux of progression and work well, although many of them are the same on both sides of the divide (such as extending the health or mana bar being available to both fields and thus able to be implemented twice).

It is the combat which will be its downfall. Despite being surrounded by the obscene and lurid, the surreal and the strange, the combat throughout brings the whole show down. A lack of a detailed combo system is a failure (you can get the achievement for a 666 hit combo with ease later in the game) and is compounded by the lack of any other weapons to get your hands on other than the same scythe you begin with. Boss battles offer little challenge too, although they are interesting, like the massive demon who leaks warped, attacking babies from her breasts.



Perhaps recognising the shallowness of the combat is what prompted the devs to include a Gates of Hell option after you complete the game, in addition to a new costume and a new difficulty setting. In this mode, Dante must survive 50 waves of enemies, all against a clock with time added for completing the round quickly, or avoiding being hit for the round duration. In theory it’s fine; in practice, it’s finished and done within 15 minutes. On my first attempt, I breezed through the 50 levels by spamming the ranged attack, and had it wrapped up with a staggering 14 minutes to spare.

From an entirely creative perspective, I’d recommend this just to see the interpretation of Hell, because the locations are often brilliant. Beyond that, there’s not much else here to go on, or to provide any enjoyment after the seven hours of play it takes to get through it.

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