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The Cop Who Reads said:
While it can be asserted that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it comes to huge marketing arcs backing an incredibly over-hyped game….yeah, it’s just rampant commercialism reeking of desperation bred by a straining economic market.
Dante’s Inferno does a number of things adequately; the frame rate is smooth enough (and given the overall amount of on-screen activity, this is tougher to pull off than it sounds), the combat mechanics are fairly intuitive, and the graphical presentation isn’t half bad. The major problem is that this has all been done before, in the *exact* fashion in which it’s found in this title. While another recent game, that being Darksiders, chose to emulate a number of classic gaming franchises while giving them the respect they deserved, it by no means engaged in the blatant cut-and-paste mentality that hits you throughout every minute of this ‘experience’. Over the top kills, massive amounts of gore, repetitive and completely unnecessary nudity (a tired mechanic wherever it’s found, in my opinion; the Skinimax crowd should not be pandered to), creative/larger-than-life bosses, a pseudo-dark setting… Even the storyline, shallow and ripped off though it may be; every piece of this title has been done someplace else and executed much better, sans the boobies, IMO.
As if the insultingly unoriginal presentation wasn’t enough, its manufacturer has subjected the gaming community to a completely ridiculous amount of desperation-hype advertising, literally slamming this drivel down our collective throats; an insane Superbowl placed ad was just icing on the collective ‘How badly do you need us to buy this game?’ cake. The crowning bottom-out achievement of this title though? Selling various amounts of souls, the cliche currency used to upgrade your character as you progress through this mess, on X-Box Live Marketplace. This would seem to give you a method to ‘get a leg up’ on the game itself, although I would tend to feel that it would more so lead one to question why they were playing this thing in the first place. Personally, I feel no further discussion is required for a move so thoroughly lame.
So for the DRM-loving moguls known as EA shoving a barely mediocre title through our collective eye sockets, a one star rating is basically standard in my opinion. The quick-flash blood, guts, and boobs crowd (this title’s apparent target demographic) will undoubtedly find much to love here, but if you’re an individual who demands much more than repetitive dross for their money, there are a plethora of quality titles to invest in far removed from this unfortunate footnote in gaming history.
As always, just my opinion though.
Rating: 1 / 5
# 5 March 2010 at 8:55 am

Paul Gomez said:
I think that the title basically summed up why I didn’t like this game too much.
Rating: 2 / 5
# 5 March 2010 at 9:54 am

Daniel Camarillo said:
This game was great! The graphics are insane! The story is very interesting and the acting!! The Nudity is also a nice touch!
Ripping enemies apart is what makes it even more fun!
All you have to do is try the demo before you buy it, but I am sure you will end up getting it anyway!
Rating: 5 / 5
# 5 March 2010 at 10:55 am

CourtK said:
This game is so cool I love playing it, I bought it right when it came out and I couldn’t stop playing it.
Rating: 5 / 5
# 5 March 2010 at 11:58 am

Cloud said:
Part of the first quarter of the year is filled with massive games that nearly everyone’s going to buy with stuff like Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, God of War 3 or Final Fantasy XIII to be sure fire purchases for many gamers, there’s the occasional in-between title that will act as a sort-of side game to work on when you aren’t busy with another game. So this week we have to highly anticipated Bioshock 2 coming out at the same time as this game, an action title developed by Visceral Games, same dev team who made Dead Space, the Simpsons game and the Godfather game. How does the title stack up? Not well considering it’s sort of sandwiched between 2 games: the smooth-as-silk combat found in Bayonetta and the PS3 mammoth that is God of War 3 and playing through Dante’s Inferno made me realize how much I miss Bayonetta as this game personally doesn’t feel polished or the least bit fun as so many annoyances bother me. Ever play a game that gets compared to another one but you realize the original was better just because of how better it felt compared to the other one? That’s what Dante’s Inferno was to me; a game that is inspired in places yet a game that stumbles way more times than it should.
Story: Taking inspiration from the first book, “Inferno” by Dante Aligheri as part of his “Divine Comedy” poem, you control Dante, a warrior in the Crusades who comes across his dead wife, Beatrice only to have her soul spirited away by Lucifer right to the depths of Hell. So with the help of a huge scythe taken by Death himself, Dante literallys goes through Hell in order to save his beloved. Here’s where it gets interesting: the story in this game is actually well told and the cinematics are quite cool so unlike Bayonetta where the story was secondary to the combat, here it’s the reverse: I kind of lamented that I had to play the game itself in order to see the story unfold. I’d rather watch someone else play this one.
Graphics: Dante’s Inferno is, no pun intended, cursed and blessed with the subject matter as the art team can go to town on the enemy designs and there’s some stuff that makes me wonder the mental stability of the individual. I’ll just say one thing: scythe for arms on a baby that crawl out of a nipple. I’ll leave it at that, rest you have to discover for yourself. Clearly the game goes crazy with the designs and there’s some messed up stuff. However this also means that the game gets unbelievably same-y after awhile and there’s only so many shades of dark red, brown and grey that it becomes slightly monotone; hell even some enemies can fade into the background given the right kind of shade. Framerate issues are practically non-existant and like I said, the mixture of rendered cinematics and the weird animation look great but the look of the game just feels so bland.
Sound/Music: What you’d expect from a game inspired by Hell: slashes, screams, belches and farts of all things and unearthly roars populate the sound mix but when there’s one sound I love: when you press RT near an enemy, you have an option to Absolve (save) or Punish (condemn) and picking the absolve option, one move is where you do a “mash B” event where you inch your cross closer to their face but once you win the event you hit their face with such a satisfying slam effect that it might listening to the overbearing soundtrack filled with “epic” choir and bombastic music more tolerable. Voice acting though is quite well-done and well the occasional line is spotty, I didn’t find it too be an embarassing voice acting job.
Gameplay: In my review I believe for Bayonetta I mentioned that there’s some combat systems you button mash and some you have to learn in order to really exceed. Well I button mash this one with the occasional block and unfortunately the combat was the first thing wrong I noticed with the game. First of all I find the controls at times to be unreliable or unresponsive as holding Block when I wanted to actually block the attack resulted in a hit anyway and just pressing A didn’t result in a jump since it was like I almost had to actually press it more than once just to get him to actually do the move. In a game where timing and keeping an eye on the battlefield is crucial, I find it poor that I can’t do a certain move whenever I need to and certain encounters were literally infuriating because dodging resulted in a hit anyway and enemies that do the background blend mentioned above got a hit on me before I even realized they were going to attack. One cool thing about the combat is in regards to the holy/unholy options for move purchasing with unholy favoring outright power moves while holy favors buffs such as heightened attack power or health upgrades. What this means however is you either have playthrough 1 doing unholy only which doesn’t have the health upgrades and buffs of holy or vice versa or you have playthrough 1 being half and half where you don’t have any of the larger upgrades of the higher tier.
Dante’s Inferno in terms of other features are just as poorly implemented like puzzles that are either too easy or too vague that you feel like “how do you solve this anyway?”. There’s some platforming parts that are literally timed and you have to run your ass off only to not actually know how to get through it and one part, the chains you’re swinging along Uncharted-style catch on fire where you not only have to jump before the fire reaches your hand but also time your jump so it passes by the occasional flame burst. Oh and occasionally you run into a lost soul that you can either punish or absolve and these are people like Elektra or Pontius Pilate so let’s say you want holy points and well you play a little mini-game where dragonballs (cause that’s what they look like to me) float towards a display of the face buttons and you have to time it so that you press the button as it reaches the icon. Basically a PaRappa the Rapper-type minigame but it’s incredibly flow-breaking, it’s boring however getting an upgrade that automatically does it doesn’t give you as much points so you’re almost encourage to play it. A late-game gauntlet of challenges of the “kill x amount of enemies or kill enemies in mid-air” variety make it poorly placed. At least Darksiders had it to brighten up the exploration, here it feels like “but we don’t want you to beat the game yet! Hm…I know! We’ll have them play little arena matches!”
Last month a game came out called Army of Two: 40th Day which was either a cool game for some but for many others it was just “eh, I’ve played better”. This to me embodies this game: sure it’s occasionally fun and I really enjoyed the story…however the more I played, the more complaints I lobbied at it. Do yourself a favor and get Bioshock 2, try out Aliens vs Predator next week but you need your action fix and you’re tired of Bayonetta or need a new action fix, go ahead but personally there’s other games are better money purchases.
Rating: 3 / 5
# 5 March 2010 at 2:14 pm

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