The game is full of minor problems and minor design hiccups, but is overall well conceived and well executed GoW clone
The gameplay is a complete, unabashed rip-off of "God of War". Right down to having to mash a button to smash open health and mana-regeneration fountains, quicktime finishing moves, and even the ability to use the protagonist's weapon as a grappling hook. Is this a bad thing? Not really. "God of War" is one of the best games of the PS2 generation, so copying its style of play is by no means detrimental. As such, action in "Dante's Inferno" is fast-paced, brutal, and for the most part enjoyable. But "Dante's Inferno" fails to match GoW in terms of fine-tuning of the combat. GoW's combat engine is almost perfect. The camera in GoW is fantastic about making sure you have a full, unobstructed view of almost every battle arena, and if you play perfectly, you can block, dodge, or counter every attack in the game, and can clear levels with little to no damage. If you get hit, or die, it is because YOU did something wrong. Not because Kratos did something stupid, and not because the enemies are unstoppable (although the tight-roping sections of Hades in the first GoW game did feel a bit ridiculous to me). The combat in "Dante's Inferno", however, is full of encounters in which the character is shoved into confined combat arenas where the camera view is often obstructed by environment or even by the character or an enemy. Many enemies have unblockable attacks that are indistinguishable from their regular (blockable) attacks until after the attack has hit you, and there are other enemies that like to park themselves off-screen and fire projectiles at you, the unreliability of the auto-targeting of the ranged cross attacks also makes it needlessly difficult to dispatch of certain enemies, since the Cross never seems to want to target the enemies that it is specifically intended to be useful against. Enemies will frequently seem to completely shrug off your attacks, continuing their combos and attacks uninterrupted and landing cheap hits on you, while Dante's own attacks and combos are easily interrupted by enemy attacks, especially projectiles and attacks from invisible enemies in the later game. There are even a couple places where an enemy attacks your character during a cutscene! So consider yourself warned: this game will cheat you into having to restart from checkpoints. If you thought "God of War" was full of cheap deaths, you ain't seen nothing yet. But these are mostly nagging issues. Most deaths that occur in this game are due to the user not reacting fast enough, and there is plenty opportunity to kick butt and have lots of fun killing demons. The game is also kind enough to invoke a Mercy Rule, so that if you die in a particular encounter (I think) more than three times, the game will recharge half your health when you restart. If you die again, the game will recharge your health completely. Of course, this wouldn't be necessary if the game's levels and placement of health-recharge fountains was a bit more cleverly done (more on this later).
But perhaps GoW's greatest strength wasn't necessarily its combat, but rather, its ingenious level design and perfectly placed camera. Even when out of combat, the platforming, climbing, and tightroping segments were flawlessly set up and executed. Levels flowed seamlessly into each other, and were always easy and intuitive to navigate, with the game clearly presenting objectives, and always giving you health and mana regeneration at points when they are most needed. "Dante's Inferno", however, is also incapable of replicating this perfecting. Problems with camera perspective permeate the game, making many platforming and tightroping segments much harder than they need to be, and the requirement to use the Double Jump (which should be abolished from games anyway) can make some platforming sequences yet again even harder. You'll sometimes have to jump or grapple onto platforms or hooks that you can't even see until you're halfway fallen to your death or be expected to double jump to change your character's direction to go AROUND obstacles in mid-air. Camera positioning will often make it hard to line up jumps and drops especially when having to drop from hanging onto a rope to another rope below you. The camera also pans very low to the ground in some places, which, combined with the overall darkness and uniform color palette of most levels, makes it difficult to see if the ground ahead of you is safe. The game also does a very good job of hiding many of its "secret" items and pick-ups, and some of them require backtracking or manipulation of the level in such a way that if you don't have advanced knowledge of the item's location, you probably won't find it. I carefully scanned every room and hallway I went into as I progressed through the game, and still missed several of the Damned, at least 5 or 6 relics, and about 5 of the Judas Coin collectibles. Another fault of the level design is the poor placement of health and mana-regeneration fountains. These fountains never seem to be located in the places where you most need them (in between enemy encounters), and almost always seem to be located right after boss fights, which is pointless since your health is usually almost fully-restored by defeating bosses anyways. To add insult to injury, the game doesn't even convert the health and mana-fountains into anything useable if your health or mana is already full (unlike GoW), so picking them up is completely useless aside from an attempt to unlock an Achievement/Trophy for using a certain number of them. Better placement of health and mana regeneration could have gone a long way towards reducing the tedium of having to restart encounters because you go into them with already critical health, and could have completely eliminated the need for the game's apparent Mercy Rule, which I mentioned above.
So if you haven't figured it out already, I think this game is quite clearly inferior to the "God of War" games. Hopefully, "God of War III" will be much better. But I've also stated above that "Dante's Inferno" is still a good and compelling game. So what does "Dante's Inferno" do to redeem itself? Well, fortunately, a lot.
The real strength of this game is in its creative and very mature artwork that in most cases faithfully captures the essence of the epic poem on which the game is based. The levels are very detailed, very artfully designed so that they look fantastic (even if the gameplay doesn't live up to the visuals). The game also runs at a silky-smooth 60 frames per second in full 1080p resolution with absolutely no screen-tearing, texture problems, or any other graphical hiccups. From a technical and presentation standpoint, the game looks almost perfect. Production quality is exceptionally high from the moment you start the game to the moment the ending credits roll. The game contains an interesting mix of in-game cutscenes for conversations with the ghost of the poet Virgil (who, like in the poem, acts as your guide to Hell), pre-rendered CG videos of important plot events, and animated flashback scenes that fill the player in on just how despicable and sinful a character Dante is. The game is also very mature, showing plenty of uncensored nudity, violence, and disturbing imagery that all fits very well with the theme of the game. There are a couple places where the may have been a bit inappropriate, but most of the graphic content is very appropriate for thematic effect and storytelling purposes.
The voice work is also very high quality, with almost all the dialogue in the game being delivered naturally. I especially liked the voice actor for Lucifer, who's voice fit perfectly with the game and character. Every other aspect of the game's sound design is also top-notch. The orchestral and choral soundtrack is superb, and the pained moans and groans of the minions of hell, along with their frequent rants of innocence or repentance adds a great deal of atmosphere to the game and creates an ever-present sense of dread.
Other elements of presentation are handled very well, with an easy-to-navigate menu system for leveling-up skills, viewing and equipping relics, and viewing the original map of the Inferno complete with icons for viewing descriptions of the enemies, characters, and commentaries from Virgil in the locations in which they happened. The zoom levels for this map could have used a bit more work though, since at the farthest zoom everything is so crammed together and you can't make out any detail of the map, but at the closest zoom its hard to navigate since you sometimes can't even see nearby items to highlight. Being able to freely move and zoom the map would have been nice, but they only gave us the ability to toggle over icons and two zoom levels.
The game also throws in a few additions to the traditional "God of War" formula that worked fairly well. Experience is divided into two categories: Holy and Unholy. Unholy experience is aquired by killing enemies with the scythe and punishing enemies and the damned. Holy experience is acquired by killing enemies with the Cross and absolving enemies and the damned. Each type of experience is accumulated separately and used to level-up your skills independently of each other. There are also Relics that can be acquired which provide Dante with passive abilities. Some of these abilities are quite usefull, and most of the Relics can be leveled up twice to make them more potent. You can only equip two Relics at any given time though, and to get the most usefulness out of them, you may have to frequently pause the game to equip a new relic for various situations.
The early game is very well-paced and a blast to play, with each level offering unique look and feel and throwing unique and thematic enemies at you. When all is said and done, the first 4 levels of the game: The journey into Hell, Limbo, Lust, and Gluttony are the best designed and most thematic levels in the game. But once you reach the end of Gluttony and enter Greed, the game really starts to fall apart. It is at this point that most of the game's problems begin to become more apparent: Combat begins to feel more like a grind and is bogged down, imbalance in enemies, camera problems, poor platforming, more frequent trial-and-error, smaller arenas, less specialization of enemies to the Level of Hell, recycling of the same enemies, and so on all start to pile up suddenly. Basically the whole game falls apart as you make your way through the Greed Level. The next few levels are better, but by then, frustration and anger has set in (maybe that was an intentional symbolic choice, as you descend into the Levels reserved for Anger and Violence?). The second-to-last level of Hell, Fraud, is also a complete disappointment, as it is set-up as a series of 10 challenges (one for each ring of Fraud) in which you are given a string of enemies to fight and some stupid restriction on how you have to fight them, ranging from having unlimited mana, to not being able to use magic at all, to having to kill an enemy by staying airborne for 8 seconds, to having a constant health deterioration, and so on. This wouldn't be so bad, if the designers had come up with challenges that are symbolic of the level of Fraud in which they occur. But they seem to have been just randomly selected. What is really sad, though, is that these challenges (by forcing you to have to defeat enemies in unique ways) are intended to be a test of your mastery of Dante's arsenal, but really do help you to learn for the first time some of the most useful applications of some of Dante's abilities and really give you a much firmer understanding of some of his more advanced combat abilities. This would have been really useful earlier in the game, so that use can use some of these techniques throughout the game, but instead, you get all this valuable practice at the very end of the game, after which there are only two more enemy encounters before fighting the end game boss.
The game also misses several other thematic opportunities throughout the game. The Limbo Level completely ignores the serene garden reserved for Virtuous Pagans, and you are never given the opportunity to talk to people like Plato, Socrates, Homer, and so on, who explain how they are happy to have the opportunity to debate and discuss with each other for all eternity without being given all the answers to their questions. This is also I think, the level of Hell in which Virgil himself resides, so you'd think he'd have talked about it at some point in the game. This was probably my favorite part of the "Inferno" poem, and is completely absent from this game. The Lust level is also surprisingly restrained and is mostly limited to a naked boss and some topless enemies, but the environment itself is mostly just purple phallic towers. The last level also ignores the description of Lucifer from the poem that states he has three faces and is eternally devouring the three greatest traitors in history: Cassius, Brutus, and Judas. In fact, there is absolutely no mention or reference to these three in the whole last level. Well, at least they got the ice right…
I did end up enjoying the game's narrative. Even though literature buffs will be displeased that it doesn't more closely follow the story of the original poem, I think the game's story makes for a nice little allegory for some modern events. The main character is a Crusader who is promised by a very evil-looking Bishop that all their sins will be absolved if they fight their Holy War against the Arabs. But when Dante visits Hell, he specifically asks Lucifer "But the Bishop assured us our sins would be absolved if we fought in the Holy War." and "Where are the infidels I vanquished, why do I not see them here?" To which Lucifer Responds "And you believed him? War is never Holy." And "This is your Hell, not theirs" respectively. The message being that those who use violence in the name of their faith are not protected by Divine Right and are sinners, just like everybody else. I was dissapointed though that your decisions whether to punish or absolve enemies and the Damned didn't come back and affect the outcome of the story, but that's a minor complaint.
Overall, I enjoyed the game, and was typically willing to overlook some of the laziness and poor design decisions that Visceral made, and I would recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of "God of War" style action, literature, or mature games in general. The gameplay is a bit rough around the edges, but only if you look at it very closely. Most of the game's faults probably won't be noticed by people who aren't playing it with a critical mindset, and those flaws will probably just be swept under the rug as being part of the game being "hard".