A reasonably good trip to hell.
User Rating: 7 | Dante's Inferno: Shinkyoku Jigoku-Hen X360
Well, Dante's Inferno does some things good, but it also does some things rather poorly. The game is derivative and in many places redundant. Dante's Inferno is yet another game that borrows heavily from the God of War template. That's not to say that it doesn't do a decent job of it. For starters lets talk about the good stuff. The visual design of this game is excellent. The enviroments are fantastic(if maybe a little too claustrophobic in places), the enemies are even better, and the cinematics look great. You are treated to the nine levels of hell and the game does of good job of presenting hell in a creepy and foreboding way. Each level of hell(greed, lust, anger, etc) has a character that is unique to it. The problem is that you will see these same characters showing up later in other levels of hell. So their uniqueness wears off rather quickly, thus the games redundancy. The sound is wonderful. You can hear the screams and pleas of the damned as you traverse the horrid landscape. The atmospheric sounds help to really foster the sense of doom. I also did not experience any graphical hiccups during my playthrough. The combat is pretty straight forward and though it is basically one note hack and slash it remains entertaining. You are equipped with two weapons, The scythe and the cross. The scythe is your melee weapon and the cross is your ranged attack. One is Unholy and one is Holy. You can level both sides up and can add new abilites such as combos, special attacks, and increased life. You can also find and recover relics in the game. These can be assigned to dante and they present certain benefits to your character. I would later find out that I had chosen wisely in what relics to assign and which abilities to level up during the final boss fight. The controls are well layed out and perfectly responsive. The difficulty is appropriate, except every once in a while the game will put you in an odd situation that is hard to predict and you will suffer some cheap deaths. The game moves along at a nice clip and stays fun until the last area. You are put through a series of tests such as kill all enemies in one combo or don't use majic. This would be fine as an add on, but not as part of the story. It kills the pace and feels like filler. The final boss was very good and probably would have been very difficult if I hadn't had a good combination of level ups.
Finally: Dante's Inferno is a good looking game and will take you to hell(in a fun way). However it borrows heavily from those that came before it and runs out of creativity along the way.
