Dante's Inferno

If you can look past the fact that Dante’s Inferno is a very loose adaptation of the classic poem, the game offers eight to ten hours of fun occasionally interrupted by unnecessary annoyances.

As they demonstrated with Dead Space, Visceral Games is capable of more than what they have done with this game.

Visceral Games has lavished Dante's Inferno with polish and atmosphere. [Issue#93, p.110]

Overall Dante’s Inferno is a pretty fun game. There is nothing really great about it, however, I enjoyed my time with the title.

Dante’s Inferno would be a much better game if it had spent a bit more time in development. The last half of the game isn’t very imaginative, the final two levels are just terrible, enemies are reused far too often and it really feels like there should have been two endings (one for each alignment).

Dante's Inferno could have offered more. It's heavily influenced by God Of War, but never seeks to do anything to differentiate itself from its influence beyond a superficial weapon development tree that has ultimately no impact on the game or the story.

Despite its refusal to innovate, its blatant copying from the God of War rulebook, and its missed opportunities, Dante's Inferno is nonetheless a solid title. At the very least, it's an engaging prospect for Xbox loyalists who've never played a God of War game. However, with the likes of Darksiders and Bayonetta on the market (as well as God of War III in our sights), Dante's Inferno is the weakest proposition of the bunch.

Ultimately, our issue is simple - if you’re going to shamelessly riff on a formula popularised and pretty much perfected by another massive game title - yes, God of War in this instance - you better be damn sure you do it better. And, sadly, aside from its excellent combat system, Dante’s Inferno misses the mark in almost every way.

Dante’s Inferno features some interesting aspects (like its combat), but early innovation loses out to repetition. The game’s biggest strength – Visceral’s recreation of hell – wanes during the second half. Some entertaining unlockable content adds to the replayability, but for most gamers, Inferno doesn’t have enough new ideas to warrant a return trip through hell.

Dante's Inferno is a decent action hack and slasher, that is ultimately let down by a lack of vision with its gameplay

Dante’s Inferno starts off big, consistently introducing new enemy types and grand environments, but by the end of the game that initial excitement turns to repetition as you fight through wave after wave of the same enemy type in increasingly familiar territory.

The game starts out with a bang, with vision and a challenge, and then becomes more of the same, over and over. The bosses get tougher, the objectives are more defined, but aside from going back and trying again at a tougher difficulty level, once through the game, there is not much reason to go back.

Despite its flaws, Dante's Inferno is definitely worth checking out, if only because it presents a unique visual take on one of literature's greatest works. It's occasionally shocking and often annoyingly repetitive, but the action is good enough to keep you engaged through what is a thought-provoking experiment in converting classic literature to a game.

While it goes through many of the same motions perfected by the best games in its genre, Dante's Inferno never reaches their lofty heights.

It locks you into a gameplay hell of sorts, giving you a devil of a time just to try and survive, though rarely making you feel like the reward is worth the incredible effort. Instead of bringing the poem to life, the gamemakers slammed the book on your fingers.

I'd recommend renting the game, playing for a few hours until you compete the Gluttony circle, and then turning it in at that point since you'll have experience the best the game has to offer by then, Going any further should be left to masochists, gluttons for punishment, and game reviewers.

The fatal flaws of Dante’s Inferno are not even its dated graphics or depressing lack of originality. It’s monotony and endless repetition that will drive you nuts.

Each of Hell’s nine circles are realised with care and character, but without innovative gameplay and with some downright outmoded game mechanics, there’s not quite enough here to distinguish Dante’s Inferno from the raft of action adventure titles available to gamers today.

Dante's epic quest loses momentum long before you reach the end.

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.

As it is, we have a solid and very playable game which will no doubt entertain genre fans, but never dares to do much more than parrot good ideas that came before in a slightly grosser way. It’s hard to dislike, but for the same reasons hard to love, too.

All in all Dante’s Inferno slowly falls into dangerous territory – it goes from being an excellent hack and slash into a mediocre hack and slash far too quickly, and when it’s not being repetitive it’s being relatively annoying.

Dante’s Inferno is a game of contradictions. It’s based on a literary epic but appeals to the most common denominator. It’s rammed full of sex, violence and depravity but sets a record as being the one of the first video game I’ve played where this feels completely tacked on. It’s just masking third-rate gameplay and a soulless experience.

Dante's Inferno is worth considering if you're a diehard hack-and-slasher fan who loves blood, gore, fire, brimstone, layered but simplistic combat systems and tits. This is more than one big lava level and it's not a terrible game. It's just not an original one, and it's arrived a little too late.

Dante’s Inferno copies God of War in every way possible, except the part that makes God of War really good: the epic scale, the fantastic build-up and original puzzles. These elements are simply lacking in Dante’s Inferno, and what remains is a brown version of the game that it was inspired by. EA could have done better with the source material.

You can see glimpses of what could have been, but it is spoilt by some bad choices and a sloppy ending.

So while it’s hard to fault the efficiency of Visceral’s final product – all carping aside, the controversial license has at least been handled with a certain care given that this is a videogame and not an academic study – Dante’s Inferno is too familiar, too regressive and too content to do the necessary minimum to recommend wholeheartedly

Another major annoyance is the save system. You can only save at designated statues, and there are only two or three per level.

The game is filled with lots of good and well-executed ideas, but they all seem to exist independently of one another. It's a popcorn movie that clearly took a good deal of talent to pull together, but comes up short of creating the grand adventure that it seems to be trying for.

The game’s rivers of blood, corpse-piles, and wailing souls make for a morbid, depression-inducing milieu. It’s a relief to be shut out of the place once the final credits roll.