“Go to Hell.”

I’ll say one thing for EA, they’ve got a lot of balls to make this game.  Balls to make it, balls to put as much effort into the advertising as they did, and balls to keep the game as uncensored from the original “vision” as possible.  They’ve got balls for miles.  When I saw the initial press for Dante’s Inferno, all I could think was that it was a God of War clone, and that this was a completely absurd amount of pre-marketing for a coming game.  Press kits with free money to reviewers, evil looking letters, and paraphernalia in the mail… EA was going all out on this one.  Unfortunately, this made my “danger sense” kick in; an old vestige from being disappointed by one summer “blockbuster” movie after another.

If the game has this much advertising behind it, it’s almost guaranteed not to be good.

So does Dante’s Inferno live up to the hype?  Or is it another overhyped game that will end up gathering dust on the back of your gaming shelf? 

I’m just going to say this from the start:  Dante’s Inferno is, without a doubt, a complete and utter clone of God of War.  That being said, it isn’t the worst thing for a game to be.  If you’re going to make an action game, taking a lot of cues from what is arguably one of the best action games ever made isn’t a bad idea.  Getting past that, the game stands well on it’s own, and is a serviceable action game in its own right.

You play the titular Dante, who in this version of the story, instead of being a passive poet, is an ass-kicking soldier in the crusades.  After promising his betrothed that he would love her forever, and that he would be chaste, faithful, and pure of heart until he returns, Dante immediately gets down to what war is all about:  fightin’, lyin’, killin’, and fuckin’.  Seriously, I have never seen a personality 180 happen so quickly or so completely as it does in Dante’s Inferno.  Suffice it to say, Dante is a complete arse of a human being, and gets his via a knife in the back.  Death comes for him, and much like another certain action game hero, Dante refuses to accept his fate.Instead, he grabs Death’s scythe and takes the weapon for his own.  After this (and by “this”, I mean the first 15 or so minutes of the game), the plot kind of comes off the rails.  See, your woman got killed while you were gone, and (for some reason) bet Satan that you were an awesome human being; a bet she lost.  So now she’s Satan’s concubine, and it’s up to you to go through the depths of Hades to come to her rescue, and save your own soul in the process.  It comes across as a flimsy excuse to get the action going, and never really resolves beyond “oh hey, everything’s okay now!” at the end of the game.  Then again, we’re not here for plot.  We’re here to kill some dudes.

And kill some dudes you do.

The combat system in the game is fast-paced and varied, and Dante has a ton of moves at his disposal.  As you either damn souls or save them, you build up points in the “holy” and “unholy” tracks, which you can use to unlock moves for the Scythe (your melee weapon) or the cross (your projectile weapon).  Dante can unlock advanced versions of his basic moves, new combos, and air launches.  All in all, there’s a wide variety of moves available, but disappointingly, once you find one combo that works, you really will just end up using it over and over for the rest of the game.  In that respect, I feel that while the pace of the action never dies down, you’ll find yourself getting bored performing the same attacks repeatedly.  It occasionally varies with enemies that have a certain weakness for one weapon or the other, but for the most part “hit, hit, launch, hit, hit, bounce, hit, hit, blast” will be your go-to combo for the entire game.  Learn it, use it, love it.

I would have less of a problem with the limitations of the combat engine if the enemies were in the least bit varied.  Dante’s Inferno takes the “palette swap” mentality to a new level,  having a grand total of approximately 7 (non-boss) enemies that get progressively more powerful as the game goes on.  The enemies will often be physically the same as previous, only they’ll be parading to battle with a shiny new shield!  It’s almost cute the way they try… the game even provides dramatic music when they march onto the battlefield, and they’re almost threatening until you realize that it’s the same old Malibu Stacy, just with a bright new hat.  This annoyance really comes to a head in the last level of the game, when you’re forced to fight ten “arena fights” to progress in the game; a segment which I swear was thrown into the game at the last minute when an executive came bursting into the developers office screaming that they needed to make the game an hour longer.  It’s needless, boring, and downright unnecessary.

Finally, this review wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the “controversy” surrounding the game.  Most (if not all) of this controversy comes from the graphic imagery in the game, with a little bit of good ol’ fashioned heresy thrown in for good measure.  When describing the game to our editor, I described it as a “13 year old’s vision of hell…replete with naked bosoms, lots of blood, and gratuitously disturbing imagery.”  The game takes this imagery completely over the top with Virgil, your “phantom companion,” providing graphic descriptions of the enemies your about to kill, such as the “corpses of unbaptized babies,” who come crawling out of the pit to accost you.  No level is more a perfect example of the blatant exploitation of the game than the “Lust” level, in which you fight your way up the inside of a phallic tower, while a topless snake-woman climbs the outside of it.  Every time you stop on a floor to fight some “lust demons” (sultry dancing naked women who occasionally sprout tentacles out of their va-jay-jays, like a reverse “Urotsukidoji” (do yourself a favor if you don’t know that word: do NOT Google it)), the Medusa stops as well.  But does she stop with her face looking at you to take a swing at you?  No, she stops so that the break in the wall is even with her chest, so while you’re fighting demons in the foreground, the entire background is taken up by a giant pear of swinging, pendulous breasts.  In a wonderful piece of irony, this is the ONLY part of this game that this author’s significant other saw, making me have to stammer out some excuse as to why I wasn’t “playing a porn game” on my television.  I think I handled it with aplomb, but the exploitation was so blatant that it’s the first time in quite a while that a game has caused me embarrassment to be seen playing.

That said, as I stated in the opening, the game is a well crafted action game, if not one that’s completely derivative.  If you’re looking for a mindless hack and slash game to play, and you’ve already played through Bayonetta, you could do worse than Dante’s Inferno.  If you’re looking for something with a decent story and any depth beyond “blood and boobs”, you’d do well to look elsewhere.  Otherwise, pick up your scythe and cross, make sure your girlfriend isn’t in the room, and go to hell.