Dante's Inferno For PSP

Basing a game on an ancient work isn’t necessarily a bad idea. There’s no author or relative to get uppity about your interpretation, and no need to worry about trivial details like the actual content of the story, especially when that story is a 14^th Century Italian poem. That nobody has actually read.

In spite of the poem’s relative obscurity, its influences range wide. So it won’t be too surprising to any player of Visceral’s hack-em-up to discover a meandering passage through the Nine Circles of Hell which protagonist Dante- now a Knight of the Crusades, and not a poet- must slaughter his way through in order to free his beloved Beatrice, slain as a punishment for Dante’s sins.

Sin is, of course, at the heart of the game’s story, and Dante’s journey through the Nine Circles is studded with flashbacks of his past and the sins he has committed, primarily as a bloodthirsty Knight during the Crusades. We’re probably supposed to feel some empathy for Dante, casting his life away in order to atone, but as his past reveals he’s done some pretty stupid things, starting with the butchery of hundreds of prisoners in the City of Acre in the game’s tutorial. These flashbacks are told through a combination of stylised, animated comic-book tableau, and fully rendered CG, though neither quite fit with the artistic style of the rest of the game. The comic book parts are stylish and sharp, whilst the CG is capably rendered but poorly motion captured. These elements are juxtaposed quite clumsily at times, making for a bit of an artistic identity crisis when the game leaps from sequence to sequence before dropping you back into the game itself, and the storyline isn’t really all that strong. We’re not given much indication of why Dante chose to commit his sins- like having his way with a female prisoner in order to free her and her brother (later revealed to be her husband), despite promising to remain loyal and true to Beatrice. Dante himself constantly bleats that the Bishop  told him that his sins would be absolved, though as Lucifer himself puts it, he probably shouldn’t have believed a ‘salesman of salvation’. Presumably there were a lot of salesmen around in 14^th Century Italy, or perhaps that would be one of the many lines not lifted from the poem.

But then, Dante’s Inferno is an action game, so perhaps expecting so much from the story was a little too much. It would be easy to describe Dante’s Inferno as God of War style, but that would be an understatement, because to all intents and purposes the combat might well be Sony’s Grecian slaughterfest with a different skin. Dante can pull off light and heavy attacks with his Scythe, unleash a ranged attack with a powered up Cross, jump, and pull off all the usual exploratory tricks like clambering along certain walls, swinging across ravines, and leaping around like a nonce. He can dodge out of the way of attacks, or block them, and by collecting Souls from defeated enemies can also learn new abilities. There’s a slight twist with the addition of a Punish / Absolve mechanic that allows you to slay enemies in slightly different ways in order to unlock different abilities, during which time other enemies will politely wait for you to decide which to do, but in practise it feels like an unnecessary addition. As with God of War, you’ll often have to finish off more powerful enemies by instigating a series of button presses when they are near death, open doors and chests by mashing away on a button, and hack off parts of the bosses with yet more button sequences. Rather than adding anything, these break up the flow of the combat jarringly, and its baffling that enemies will wait patiently for you to finish absolving or punishing one of their brethren, but rain attacks on you when you’re hammering away at the B button to try and open a health chest.

That aside, though, the combat is mostly entertaining. Its fast and fluid, with just enough enemy types to keep you on your toes without feeling too swamped, and whilst you can just hammer away with the attack buttons and have some success, there is some skill to be found in the counter system that lets you initiate a powerful attack when you tap block just before a blow hits Dante. The boss battles are the most impressive set pieces of course, pitting Dante against some remarkable creations, but they’re often a little too easy; even the first battle against a wimpish Death (who pleads for his ‘life’ quite pathetically) is too much of a walkover, and they don’t get much trickier from there.

Source:http://www.gameshard.net