The question I've been asking myself since I first picked up the controller is whether Visceral should be (to use the game's jargon) punished or absolved for expertly remaking another game. On the one hand, they could easily be labeled as thieves or copycats or just plain lazy for having no more aspirations than doing what someone else already did. Yet, in this landscape of terrible, terrible sequels, homages, satires, and just plain rip offs, can there be no commendation for a mirroring a game people are literally salivating for sequels to, and doing so exceedingly well? It would be easy to burn paragraphs contrasting Dante and its progenitor, but that seems more like an exhaustive "dig" than a real review to me. So just know that every little thing I highlight (and rip on) here has already been highlighted (and ripped on) in another better known title.
"Based" on the poem of the same name, Inferno documents one man's descent through the 9 Circles of Hell. Being charged with Christian mythology the tale is quite obviously open to interpretation, done so in this case as an action packed tale of revenge (maybe), love (probably) and violence (definately) chronicling one man's quest to rescue his wife. You see its hard to classify Dante as a hero or his task as just in any way, because he is in almost no way a good guy. The gameplay has him brutally and savagely slaughtering everything in his path including former friends and family members, while the plot gradually paints him a sinner by every single definition the canon has to offer. Truth be told I haven't finished the games entire narrative, but it has become increasingly difficult to get behind Dante's whining to Lucifer about how unfair stealing his wife is when he just finished raping someone else after murdering their true love. His brutal single minded sense of valor seems more intune with those demons he seeks to defy than the dainty innocent flower he's so desperately trying to get back to.
The good news is, plot sensibility is not Inferno's business, killing is. And business is good. With a scythe for close up killing, a magic cross to fire from afar, a smattering of increasingly destructive spells, and a massive tree of abilities to unlock for it all, there is no shortage of mayhem at your disposal. You won't need half of it to undo the legions of hell, and you won't really need ANY of it once you discover the brain dead infinite combo that somehow slipped through play testing, but at least the option for varied combat is there. 100+ hit combos, aerial raves, timed counter attacks, quick time event finishing moves, and all the other modern action game cliches are at Dante's disposal and executing them is just as easy and satisfying as they should be. There is of course a catch to all the awesome hyper violent action, and that is the limp wristed attempt to add depth to the ability unlocking system.
Basically, by absolving or punishing enemies when you finish them, you can advance the holy/unholy levels that govern just what you can buy with your kill points. I find it neat that this also governs which stat modifying relics you can equip, but the actual combat abilities are pretty poorly distributed between the two. For instance, the health up unlocks are on the opposite sides of all the scythe power ups and abilities (because health is good and the scythe is evil, I guess), so if you do decide to focus on close combat (which I always do), you're going to do so with either a child sized lifebar or a pathetically weak set of scythe attacks. You can try and mitigate this by spending an equal amount of time being holy / unholy, but even if it were possible to max out both sides by the end of the game (which I doubt), that practice will keep you from unlocking any of the really good abilities until the end of the game when you don't need them or even want them anymore.
The whole Un/Holy thing attempts to permeat the entire thing, but its all executed very flat and superfluous. In addition to most enemies being disposable via punishment/absolution, Dante will occasionally be presented with a prominent character from the poem who can be used similarly for massive points in either direction. Still, outside of the points and note in your "journal", they don't effect the narrative and you never hear about them ever again. I am sure there's some totally black and white good / bad ending selection process at work that will force me to go through the game twice, but the net result of being Holy / Unholy is just whether or not I prefer to use the blue button or the yellow button on my controller while I do it. I'm still going to kill the same procession of "bad guys" in the same ways getting there, and that seems like kind of a waste.
Still, I cannot in good conscience call Dante's Inferno a bad game by any really sense of the term. Its based in a universe you certainly don't see games about every day, it looks, sounds, and plays like someone actually put some thought into it, and its damned fun. Fate has kept me from a complete play through of Visceral's previous effort, Dead Space, but my experience with both has made it clear that they know their way around both game design and execution, even if all they seem to be able to come up with is other peoples ideas. Dante's Inferno is filled with spectacle, style, and above all else violence, so if any of that is your thing, I sincerely recommend you "Go To Hell". And if by some chance you've missed out on that other game series where all the mythology gets brutally murdered by a morally gray anti-hero (or you just don't own a PS3), you pretty much have no excuse.
-F.
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