Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, of which Inferno is the first part, is considered amongst the world’s greatest pieces of literature. It codified the medieval concept of Heaven and Hell into human understanding and cast Satan as a victim of his betrayal of God, a very powerful theme picked up by Renaissance art. The phrase “abandon hope all ye who enter here” and a host of other well known phrases are taken from Dante’s poem, and he inspired and has been quoted and paraphrased by countless others from Chaucer to Pope Benedict XVI. The imagery and allegory of the poem lend itself to interpretation, so it is of no real surprise that eventually it would become the basis of a video game.

In the poem Dante simply takes a stroll through Hell with the Roman poet Vigil, fainting quite often and then coming face to face with Satan who is represented in his ugliest form steadfastly refusing to stop flapping his wings and hence frozen in ice unable to move because of his own pride (as the poem is about Contrapasso, or poetic justice).

Which when you think about it doesn’t really inspire a confident story for a videogame so developer Visceral Games have taken some liberties with the original text. Instead of a poet, Dante becomes a Crusader who decides to fight Death to rescue his beloved Beatrice, whom he betrayed. Beating Death and taking his scythe as his own, Dante descends into Hell in order to win the soul of his loved one back.

Dante’s descent into Hell starts off well. Kicking the crap out of the Grim Reaper, you gain his mystical scythe and learn one of the neat things about Dante’s Inferno – punishing or absolving the souls of those who reside there. When in combat, pressing the left trigger will grab enemies, and you’ll have the option of punishing or absolving smaller combatants. Bigger enemies, like the Minotaurs, required a bit of beating up before a prompt to squeeze the Right Trigger appears to punish or absolve. Punishing souls upgrades the Unholy path concerned with the scythe, whereas absolving upgrades Beatrice’s cross.

The rest of the gameplay of Dante’s Inferno is exactly like God Of War on the Playstation. You have a fixed camera for each scene. There’s a light and heavy attack with a main weapon on the X and Y buttons respectively, and a ranged weapon using the B button. You avoid attacks using the left stick. You gain health from containers, and can upgrade your attacks with items. There are environmental puzzles to overcome by pushing objects and during boss fights and in some cinematic moments you’ll be forced into quick time events – timed button presses.
Not being the hugest fan of God of War, I found the same frustrations with that game here. Sometimes you’d miss something attacking you because of the camera angles. The button presses in the QTEs were never intuitive, and if you weren’t on the ball you’d fail and have to repeat the sequence. You’d walk or puzzle through to an arena which would become locked off, and you’d have to fight a number of bad guys until it became unlocked. To me it’s just doing the same thing over and over.

It’s confounded in Dante’s Inferno because you are doing the same thing over and over. Although there are many enemies to fight at one time, there are only about 5 different types of enemies, and once you learn their attack sequence and upgrade your weapons to about 5th level, you just end up going through the motions to get through the game. I honestly finished the game simply by mashing B to fire off Dante’s Cross attack.

And this is really disappointing because the enemy design is fantastic. The unbaptised babies are awesome with their horrendous knife arms and big heads. The gluttons are disgusting with multiple faces in layers of fat. The lust demons are just the right combination of sexy and horrible. Some of the set piece design is highly reminiscent of HR Geiger, the mash of organic and material, the grotesque and erotic.

Adding to the clever creature design is fantastic sound design. The screams and howls of the damned constantly echo through Hell. Each level has its specific yells when you climb on the walls of souls (which you do every freaking level!) – Greed has people demanding you give them your cross, whilst in Anger you’ll hear all kinds of threats of violence. The rest of the voice acting is less impressive, with Dante himself being damn whiny, although Satan is suitably smarmy.

The environmental puzzles throughout the levels are never too challenging, involving locating switches and moving and jumping on boxes, with environmental exploration rather predictable – you see where you have to go, and simply go. Worst of all is the rope swinging and chasm jumping areas. So many times, due mostly to bad camera angles, you’d make a leap of faith from rope to rope or chasm to chasm, and more often than not that faith was misplaced.

Another problem with Dante’s Inferno is God Of War made you want to experience the world of Ancient Greece. Although we know about it through school and television, GoW has a unique and interesting twist on that understanding which made us want to explore their take on it, with Kratos himself being an intriguing character. Dante on the other hand has no redeeming features. He’s whiny and his motivation seems shallow and trite. Even though he mentions it every chance he gets, you never really feel he’s motivated by his love for Beatrice. And Beatrice doesn’t seem worth saving either – she just bitches at Dante the entire time for betraying her.

To make matters worse, Hell is so repetitive. This is Dante’s Inferno, an amazing poem describing the nine levels of Hell as they descend away from God! There’s a feeling of descent as you trapeze down rope and fall down holes, but then you simply go into corridor after corridor, room after room. You never feel as though it’s all a complete, intertwined universe. The game never really gives you any sense of the scale of the Inferno, except in the set pieces. And admittedly everything is meant to be drab and dreary in the underworld, but the colour scheme of next gen red, brown and black gets so tedious that you just begin to ignore it all after a while.

But I think the greatest injustice is there are levels called Greed, Lust, Anger, and they’re just backdrops to button mashing. Dante’s Inferno is a Contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice, wherein the punishment fits the crime. False prophets have their heads on backwards. Satan’s pride keeps him frozen. How cool would it be to have some kind of gameplay device that incorporated being tempted to give into anger and have you punished for it, or tempted you with shiny items in Greed that made the game extremely difficult if you pursued them? Instead we have the same button mashing enemies to kill. Sure, in Lust the backdrop is a giant Cleopatra with tongues as nipples, but apart from a short environmental puzzle to solve to get rid of her, it’s simply mashing buttons and killing tonnes of enemies like the rest of the game.

Conclusion:
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. The enemy design, whilst interesting, was subsumed by the repetitiveness of the game and level design. La Divina Commedia is such a great source to stage a game from, but the writers clearly didn’t understand the material deeply enough to make the best use of it for gameplay purposes. In short, Dante’s Inferno could have been a fantastic new IP for EA, but when it comes down to it; it’s just a generic GoW clone.

Pros:
Excellent character and set piece design
Nice skill development
Excellent sound

Cons:
Bland level design
Very repetitive combat
Poor use of static cameras
Poor use of the source material

70/100