Dante's Inferno Review

Heaven or Hell?

As a fighting game, Dante’s Inferno isn’t utterly awful. At times it actually borders onto the functional or fun, with a fairly extensive and robust collection of moves and combos.

The bosses especially are massive and intimidating, making for some incredibly tense combat sequences – the sort of love-to-hate-it moments where you explicitly tell the game on your eighteenth attempt to defeat Lucifer that if it doesn’t stop mucking about then you’re going to force feed the disc to the garbage disposal.

Dante’s Inferno is fantastic at creating these moments and there are areas of Hell that are actually very addictive, despite the fact that the fighting system, while expansive, doesn’t have the depth of it’s competitors. Where Dante’s Inferno starts to seriously falter though is in the finer points of the game design; the over-abundance of mundane, repetitive QTEs (Quicktime Events, if you've just divided to the last page) and the masochistically spaced-out save points, to name a few.


This latter point is one which begins to seriously grate the more time you invest in the game, as Visceral Games has been incredibly stingy with the save points and health fountains. More annoying is that health fountains require you to button-mash them to use, making them useless in any fight where you’d actually need them. That’s just mean, even for the Devil.

Then there’s the story and the presentation, both of which clash with EA’s frankly ridiculous claims that the game is trying to stay true to the sentiment of Alighieri’s epic poem and not just spinning a freely distributed classic into a money maker. The extra material and videos that can be unlocked as you play are full of all sorts of claims meant to impress on gamers that the game is something more than the cynics might expect, but the reality is that all these assurances are as empty as the average election promise.

Dante’s Inferno may claim to be many things, but the reality is that it’s mostly a run-of-the-mill fighting game that’s been crudely lavished with blood and boobs in an attempt to attract a young adolescent market – a fact not nearly as depressing as the reality that it’ll probably work. There’s needless nudity littered throughout the game in a misguided attempt to make the world feel more mature, while Hell itself is mostly the same as anybody would predict – tortures, blood and yet more nudity. It’s not striking, intelligent or impressively detailed; it’s actually pretty banal and dull, not to mention de-sensitizing.


There are elements of the design which are actually unnerving admittedly, and a personal favourite are the netted walls that the utterly unsympathetic (and actually pretty monstrous) Dante can clamber over. At first they look like any other texture, but a closer look reveals the wall is built of human bricks and that the nets hold in a thousand writing souls who call for your help. Brr.

Stand-out chill-maker moment like this are few and far between though, and it’s a real shame that Visceral hasn’t tried to create a more unique take on Hell, as that’s one thing which could have helped to redeem the fiction and stopped all the embitterment that has followed the choice of setting. It’s also something that the videogame medium – and even the fighting genre – would have been very much suited too. Instead though, the Hell portrayed in Dante’s Inferno is something we’ve seen a million times before, and which has lost a lot of potency over the centuries.

Lacking a truly original take on the premise, it’s at least fairly easy to see Dante’s Inferno for what it really is; a fairly unremarkable fighting game that’s seriously wounded by an egregious wealth of tiring QTEs, needless gore and boring characters and enemies. The actual on-screen action and the mechanics of fighting as Dante are by far the strongest parts of the game, but Dante’s Inferno itself has been unfortunately timed and the reality is that if you’re only looking to buy one (or even two) single player fighting game this quarter then it shouldn’t be Dante’s Inferno. It can’t match the quality, imagination or polish of it’s rivals.

Score Guide