The one thing that everyone says about this game is that it's a God of War clone and it was for that reason that a lot of people I knew at the time either didn't buy it or gave it a bad rap. Being honest, they are completely correct, Dante's Inferno is a SHAMELESS God of War clone in pretty much every detail. The combat feels very similar, the boss fights all end in bombastic QTE's, you get souls to upgrade your character as the game goes on etc. etc. But none of that make Dante's Inferno a bad game, there are a lot worse things you could be cloning and as far as it goes, despite some jank here and there, it plays pretty well. If you like God of War then there's no real reason I can think of as to why you wouldn't enjoy this.
It does have some things of it's own though, such as the dual upgrade trees that are marked "holy" and "unholy" and gain experience based on if you commit gruesome murder or if you commit gruesome murder in a slightly more pious way. Each of these trees have their own skills and upgrades, with Unholy being focused on your scythe and Holy being focused on your shooty hadoken cross thingy. The other thing it offers is a sort of judgement system where you find lost souls and you choose to absolve them to heaven or stab them through the face for huge amounts of experience points in one of your upgrade trees. The weird thing about this system is that if you choose to absolve a lost soul then you have to play Dance Dance Revolution for about a minute before the game gives you the exp which can bring things to a screeching halt and is generally quite an annoying thing to have to do.
The one thing I hated more than anything else about this game was the difficulty level balancing. I started the game on Hellish, the games hard mode and I started getting my ass kicked. This was fine, I wasn't expecting hard mode to just let me win but as I progressed and got stuff off the upgrade tree and unlocked more equipable relics it hit me that the game wasn't really playing fair. With a New Game+ file hard mode seems challening but reasonable but from a fresh file Hellish mode is just hair pullingly annoying. Enemies will do damage like it's Dark Souls in Hellish but in Normal they do <1% of your health with a big wind up unblockable. On a new game plus this would be offset by a relic you get about half way through the game and you'd have a lot more options with spells and combo upgrades from the unholy tree to deal with the scenarios but when your a baby crusader taking your first trip into the rings it's borderline impossible unless you have a lot of prior experience.
So despite some jank, the hard mode being way too hard and the normal mode being laughably easy Dante's Inferno isn't a bad little game at all. It's the kind of thing that would be good to play when you have gaming friends over, something to fiddle with and you don't have to think too hard about while you have conversations about whatever. The cutscenes and game help boxes are also equal parts awesome and hilarious so even if you end up hating the gameplay it's probably worth playing just for that to be honest.
The game ends on a very saddening "to be continued" screen as well. I imagine the developers had plans to do games for heaven and limbo but this game probably just didn't do well enough. Give it a go if you can get your hands on a copy. Brain off, scythe out and just enjoy the sights and the action.
