1.5 out of 5 fireballs

Its plot is based on an epic poem. Its game controls are derived from ‘God of War.’ But these two elements factored together are executed terribly, giving players no reason to even pick up the game ‘Dante’s Inferno.’

‘Dante’s Inferno,’ which was released in February, is a rare breed of video games: one based on historic literature. Much like the promotional movie ‘Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic,’ based on a historic poem, the developers take a large number of artistic liberties with the story. Not all succeed.

Based on the first part of the famous poem ‘The Divine Comedy,’ by the medieval poet Dante Alighieri, the story follows the character Dante as he attempts to rescue his love interest from the depths of hell. In the original ‘Divine Comedy,’ Dante traveled through the nine circles of hell. He did not forcibly fight anything within hell. Instead, he traveled through the circles as peacefully as possible.

So, to spice things up, Visceral Games makes Dante a rebel who holds no reservations about murdering anything in his path. The heavy symbolism of the original poem is replaced with extensive blood, guts and gore, and overexposed breasts. To appeal to a wider audience, the developers rewrote much of the story to render the original poem irrelevant.

At first glance, there seems to be no reason to make these vast changes. But these atmospheric changes are an attempt to keep gamers interested.

Uninteresting storylines are nothing new to video games. These games can usually stand on their own because of high-quality game mechanics alone. Visceral Games chose to copy something rather than create its own. ‘Dante’s Inferno’ blatantly rips off ‘God of War,’ a similar game from SCE Santa Monica Studio.

As players travel through hell, they slowly realize that this ‘new’ game is just a copy of this well-known favorite.

In both games, the player can perform either a heavy or light attack. Or they are given the option to chain them together to perform combination attacks. The problems with ‘Dante’s Inferno’ start to emerge after the appearance of enemies that take more than one hit to die. In ‘God of War’ the combat is smooth, fluid and gratifying. In ‘Dante’s Inferno’ the game play feels sticky, awkward and, at some points, broken.

The response of enemies to the light attacks makes it feel like Dante is wielding a pillow instead of a scythe. The heavy attacks take so long for the animation to run that most enemies can get one or two hits on Dante before the attack is actually executed.

Sadly, any attempt that Visceral Games has made to create something original within the game simply ended horribly. Arenas were added near the end of the game to increase playing time, but they ended up being the most tedious part of the entire game. The game forces the player to beat each arena while still meeting a certain criteria such as ‘lose ‘X’ percentage of life’ to ‘kill every enemy without ending your combo.’ Every one of them just adds irritation to the overall experience and makes the player want to put down the controller and walk away.

The problems with ‘Dante’s Inferno’ run deep. It could have been a great story, but it ended up being lackluster. The actual playing of the game creates more frustration than enjoyment. With nothing exciting or new about this game, players have no reason to play it. Instead, save $60 and buy ‘God of War III’ when it comes out in three weeks.

vhemsley@syr.edu

Published on March 9, 2010 at 12:00 pm