Well, hello there, dear steemians! Today I wish to take you on a road trip through the bowels of Hell.
Yes, you might have heard about this game, Dante's Inferno. Visceral Games, the dead studio behind the also dead series which is Dead Space actually managed to make a pretty nice clone of God of War back in 2010, only a few weeks before God of War 3. But, was it any good? Let's find out!
On the visual front, the game looks pretty nice, great aesthetics which really inspire the fact that you are adventuring through Hell itself: fires, damned souls which are stuck on spikes or being boiled and even devoured by other creatures and many more things like these, letting you know you should probably just go away. When you are fighting, the arenas are filled with diverse visual effects, like blood splattering, sparks coming off your weapons, lights being generated by your spells and these things come together in a pretty satisfying visual clash of elements. I have one problem with the game though: it has a habit of shoving the tits of Dante's wife in your face all the time, even during her death scene,where she is stabbed twice. Stay classy, Visce...oh right, Dead Space also had no restraint.Anyway, there is another interesting aspect to the visual presentation which makes it stand out: the game is loosely based on the Divine Comedy, which is pretty interesting, as that is kind of a mishmash of Greek mythology elements, like Charon and Cerberus, implanted in the Christian depiction of Hell.
The story of the game is pretty straightforward (reminding me of the story of Mario games actually): save the girl. Thing is, Dante's wife, Beatrice, is innocent, and she is only in Hell because Dante went on a Crusade and sinned a lot, drinking everything that could be drank, fucking everything that could be fucked and killing everything that could not be drank or fucked. He did all this stuff, because a priest promised that everyone involved would be absolved of all sins. So... the story is pretty stupid as a whole, and Dante is retroactively unlikeable as all Hell because he made a huge mistake and now he shows a bit of decency and tries to fix it. He also sewed a piece of leather shaped like a cross to his chest, detailing everything which has happened during the Crusade, which makes me ask: did he detail every crime he has commited during that time?
So, story is a big bust and graphics feature a big bust prominently. What about the gameplay? Well, if you played God of War 2 at any point in your life, this is a carbon copy. You can double jump, dodge using the left stick, do a big circular attack with your weapons and many combos are copiright infringingly similar ( I really don't know how they got away with it, to be honest). There is also a cross attack, which shoots out crosses made out of light which have a small amount of auto aiming to them. The only difference is when executing enemies. You still grab them and do a quick time event, but you can chose whether to punish them or absolve them. This determines which one of two skill branches gets a new set of unlocks. You would think this would tie up into a binary moral system of sorts, but nope, it only unlocks stuff in the skill tree. There are also collectibles scattered around, which consist of Judas coins, which come in sets of five and grant you XP to unlock stuff in the skill tree, damned, which are people from history or mythology, which you can absolve or punish for rewards in the respective skill branches and relics, which you can equip for small perks like increased damage resistance or magic regeneration.
All in all, the game looks nice and plays nice, but the story is quite dumb. I regard it as a gem of the last generation consoles, and weirdly it got a PSP port without losing content in the translation, which is quite admirable. I recommend buying this if you are into spectacle fighters.
@StefaNonsense @ROPname 