Welcome to Hell, no, literally, we're going to Hell! Released back in 2010 and a rental from Blockbuster, (miss you, mate) introduced me to the Hell Dante suffers. With a heavy resemblance to God of War, this could be a highly praised game.
Absolutely beautiful cinematics, some of the best I've ever seen. It's a shame the in-game cinematics and graphics don't look this great. The graphics aren't bad, but sometimes it looks cartoony. Dante's helmet makes his eyes look ridiculously spaced apart, almost fish-like. Dante is condemned for the sins he has committed, but denies them and takes Death's scythe and splits him in two. Pretty fucking cool, right? When returning home, his love Beatrice, as well as his father are found murdered. Beatrice appears and speaks to Dante, before being swept into Hell by Lucifer himself, thus beginning our next crusade to save his love.
We go through Hell and encounter the Deadly Sins, each sin bring new enemies and often a fitting boss fight for each. The majority of the boss fights are really good and some of the enemies and bosses are well designed. While in Hell, a blue ghost-like man often appears called Virgil. He acts as a sort of Hell tour guide and informs you on your surroundings. It's a hack and slash game, I often was bored of the fighting because you are constantly fighting. You get small breaks and are presented with some well made puzzles. There was a bunch of nudity and some was pretty disturbing. A giant Cleopatra' s nipples opened up which came with enemies and some female enemies presented us with a tongue-like penis and were making loud moaning noises... I did say it was disturbing. The beast mourning was pretty cool and the typical stomp and swing attacks worked really well.
There were multiple types of cutscenes, but the comic style ones were my favourite. They were short and sweet and looked great. Lucifer looked quite bland, as he was just a plain, smoke-filled man, his final transformation was much more appealing. Lucifer was the best character and he was brilliantly voiced too. Dante and Virgil were well acted too. I enjoyed the story of traversing through Hell to find your love, very similar to Shadows of the Damned (2011). There was also a great twist ending. At the end, it says 'To be continued', 7 years later there is no news of a sequel, unless it meant it was continued through books.
The music fits this perfect, it's haunting and disturbing. You certainly won't catch me listening to the Dante's Inferno soundtrack on YouTube! It's very bloody and mature, but you get to choose whether to play a holy or unholy path. You can play both if you so choose, each path provides you new upgrades the more you do. You can find relics that can give you abilities to help you and even some magic powers that you can button map to suit you. You also have the ability to shoot holy crosses that hurt the enemies, it's unlimited and you can fire them for as long as you want, I felt it better to hardly use them.
An unfortunate event, in a series of them was the constant button mashing. Want to use a health or mana fountain? Button mash. Open a sealed door? Button mash. Absolve an enemy? Button mash. There was so much I automatically started to button mash when pulling a lever for an elevator, you only need to press a button once for that. The camera was really far out and you couldn't even move it an inch. There was no autosave and you could only save your game when you found a Beatrice statue. The platforming and rope manouvering sucked and caused many deaths. There were a couple of glitches, but nothing game breaking. The worst was killing unbaptised babies. I know this is a religious game and unbaptised babies don't go to Heaven, but asking me to kill something that look exactly like a baby is something I don't want to do, you can give them grey skin and claws to make them look evil all you want, it's still a baby. I just don't think it was necessary and I made sure to absolve all the babies.
I loved it the first time around, not nearly enough the second time, but I appreciate that it is still a good game. I can't compare it to God of War, as I'm yet to finish any, but as it's own game I'd say it's certainly worth a go.
7.5/10
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