Overdue Review: Dante's Inferno (Xbox 360)

The game related pickings have been somewhat slim for the last month or so, so Butler decided to jump back to the holiday season and give Dante's Inferno a go.  How did this intrepid reviewer fare?  More after the jump!

The epic poem of Dante's Inferno takes the reader on a journey through hell itself, outlining the near indescribable horrors that await the sinners of the world.  The gluttons, the avaricious, the lustful... well, anyone who has seen Se7en knows what I'm talking about.  Due to technological constraints of the time, however, I feel that there is one circle that Dante left out, and it is the circle of hell dedicated specifically to those who ever worked on or allowed someone to pay money for the video game of Dante's Inferno.  Their punishment, of course is, for all eternity, to have to play the game that they allowed to be sent into the world.  Now, to say that this is the worst game I have ever played is most likely a hyperbolic statement, but I honestly can only think of two other titles that have ever made me so angry so quickly that I sell them back (usually at significant cost to myself) just because I see no merit in anything the title may attempt to offer and am worried about my good games suddenly catching a case of spontaneously sucking by being near these titles.  So I can now say that this game completes my Too Human - Prince of Persia (2008) - Dante's Inferno trinity of horror and despair.

But OK, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.  I shouldn't just start talking about how the game sucks without offering any proof.  But first, to show that I am willing to find good in everything, I will say this: the first 5 minutes of the game were great.  See, I'd been holding off because there were a lot of bad reviews, but a lot of people saying that the game plays a lot like God of War.  Not being the owner of a PS3, I haven't played one of those titles for a solid 3 or 4 years, but I did love the crap out of what they were trying to do with it.  And the first 5 minutes was very, very God of War.  Brutal-ass kills, enemies swarming all around you to be dispatched by your ridiculous sweeping or aerial combos, and a button-mashy but kind of fun interface to add some spice to how you're fighting.  You start out as Dante a crusader attacking... some city, I'm honestly not sure, but the important part is that apparently he is there to murder everyone.  He gets killed, dukes it out with the angel of death, and returns home to check on his beloved (and constantly bare-breasted) Beatrice.  She has, of course, been killed and Dante heads into hell to get those ripe-ass titties back from Lucifer (who apparently needs HER titties in specific, as opposed to the myriad of other lustful whores that are pouring into hell in  a literal tornado).  Along the way he learns that... um... alright, I have to level with you: I played this game through the prologue, the circle of lust, and the combo area of gluttony and avarice (about 4 hours total) before I gave up completely, realizing that I had not had a lick of fun playing this abortion since I actually dove into the meat of the game.  It's like God of War if the whole game was like the part where you clawed your way past the blades of hades for hour after hour.  Remember how much we all loved THAT?  Anyway, back to the plot: What I extrapolate that we are supposed to learn is: do not listen to deacons who have fire for eyes when they say you are absolved of all sin, and also the crusades were probably a pretty bad thing.

Progress.

So what is it in specific about this game that makes it so very bad?  Well, let's take a look at the controls.  First of all, and this REALLY should not have to be said at this point: In any 3rd-person action-platformer, the right analog stick of the controller should serve one and ONLY one function: camera control.  I say this, because instead of giving us the camera control we so desperately need, the right analog is dedicated to one of the most imprecise dodging mechanics to which I've ever borne witness, one that more often than not will send you in a different direction than what you flicked and straight into the mouth of the greed-worm about to eat you (which, surprise surprise, you escape with a quick-time button tapping event).  But bad dodging wouldn't piss me off as much if I HAD ANY GODDAMN CAMERA CONTROL.  I say this because the game is, to its LIMITED credit, very well designed.  It's too bad that they are more often than not interested in making you check out the 80% of meticulously designed hellscape with which you CAN'T interact in any way, making Dante roughly 5 pixels tall on screen at all times.  It is SO zoomed out that a lot of times you can't tell what's a platform and what's just some "hell stuff" that will send you plummeting to your doom.  It's almost as if they KNEW they had made a game that controlled like you were manipulating the controller with your cock, so they decided that maybe we'd get distracted by the pretty hellscapes instead.  I wasn't.

There is also the unfortunately ever prevalent moral choice system present in that at any point you can grab some enemy, press one button, and get holy or evil points depending on if you play guitar hero to absolve their sins (I'm not kidding) or press the one button that makes them dead.  The decision is relatively simple, but almost game-breaking in its execution, as technically every minor enemy in the game is a one hit kill.  Not that you can be bothered to deal with that because of the "special" enemies trying to rape you with their dick-nipples or whatever baffling sexual conglomeration the artistic teams deemed "scary and so totally not the stupidest fucking thing ever".  These enemies can only be killed by mashing X, occasionally punctuating those with some mashing of Y, then some more quick-time events.  Because those have SO totally not gotten tired, played out, and gimmicky as, well hell.

Yeah, I seriously LOVE doing this.

So to summarize: the plot is absolute bollocks, the characters are given the depth of your average wading pool, the game controls like it was programmed by a lone amputee with palsy, every boss fight is a sequence of "button-mash-dodge-button-mash-dodge-quick-time-event", and the weapon level trees are almost entirely superfluous to anything you generally need to do in the game beyond the first tier.  It is paced at an agonizingly padded rate, and all in all just feels like the result of some high schooler's sketchbook (one who was way too obsessed with HR Geiger and decided everything needed to have tits always) brought to horrifying, digital life.  So seriously, from me to you, if you ever have the urge to try this game, first blow off the dust from your PS2, pick up a copy of God of War and play that instead.  Video games are always a lot more fun when they don't give you rage related embolisms.

The average human, roughly 15

minutes in to Dante's Inferno.