Dante's Inferno is monotonous, and despite its captivating re-imagining of the poem Divine Comedy, uninspired.
What we have here is a game that looks bad, sounds bland, and is so boring that you won't have any desire to finish it. The only reason I trudged through this ugly mess is because I have vowed to complete every game I own. With a trade-in value of 18 cents, I couldn't get rid of it either.
The graphics would excel among the best looking last generation games, but they look terrible up to today's standards. Dante's Inferno could easily feel at home on a PlayStation 2 or Xbox, but not here on current generation systems.
The voice acting is pretty good but the game sounds muddy. None of the sounds stand out and it never sounds like you're doing much when you slash and pound enemies. The ambiance of your footsteps and the grunts and groans of your enemies feels like they're drowned out in the background.
The game play is like God of War but easier and less varied. You have one weapon and one secondary power that you can upgrade. You've also got a whole slew of special moves you can execute with your scythe but you'll find yourself only using two or three of them.
There are two skill trees that Dante can follow. Light and Dark. Throughout the game you'll absorb souls and depending on whether you save or damn souls you encounter, you'll collect light and dark points you can spend. The game is incredibly unbalanced because the light path is much easier to complete the game with, one part in particular where having a certain light power makes a battle a hundred times easier than if you were using dark powers. You can mix and match powers as well, but you only get a certain amount of points and if you want high level skills in one path, you have to invest in the lower level skills of that same path first.
Like many reviews have stated, the first third of the game is challenging and fun with some spectacular boss fights on the first three levels of Hell. After that there is maybe one or two boss fights and a lot of filler content. The game would be short but great if it had ended after the first three levels.
Lastly, the boss of the game is so difficult and the battle itself is so long that I had to change the difficulty from the hardest setting to the easiest setting. The battle is simply too long and too drawn out, forcing you to repeatedly dodge the same attack over and over for almost a half hour.
Dante's Inferno would make a wonderful short story, or a wonderful art book, but it makes for a lousy gaming experience. One that was clearly rushed by the developers as a result of overconfidence. We deserve the quality of Visceral's previous efforts Dead Space and Dead Space 2, not this shallow lackluster imitation.