Someone's excited about Dante's bone.
In part one of the review for Dante’s Inferno’s demo, I stated that the game is stupid at least twice and then said I wasn’t finished. Well, this is going to wrap it up, so enjoy yourselves through my continued misery.
When we last left our hero Dante, he was fighting demons from Hell in his backyard. Well, after the barrier mishap and the defeat of his enemies, Dante dashes up the hill behind his house and goes into a church where his dead wife’s spectral body is. I know this game is still trying to be edgy, but why does it have so many boobs? I mean, sure, you can have boobs in a game and it doesn’t really matter. This game seems to be slamming boobs in your face like Bayonetta or something, but what point does it serve? It’s not like chicks were naked all the time back then, or were they? I don’t know, seems like a religious person would want to cover up more since I don’t think she was married to Dante at the time.
Whatever, she gets taken again after saying something about vowing, then you place down the cross you’ve been carrying on your hip, and then you find out that the church is built over Hell. I may not be an architect or surveyor, but I don’t think building over a chasm of Hell is a really good idea. So some flying bat/mosquito demons attack and you’re prompted to use the cross. I used it, it’s stupid. I’d much rather be cleaving demons into nothingness with Death’s scythe since this game keeps pushing violence in my face. Hey, isn’t that a level of Hell? Fnarr, fnarr.
Anyway, you fight off the demons as the floor of the church starts to break apart. Oh, and just so everyone knows, the best way to kill the demons and not die because combos give you too much forward momentum is to just absolve or punish them. While I haven’t really figured out what absolving or punishing them does for you, it just gives you two more souls so you can upgrade your abilities. But, by “abilities”, I mean “it gives you more combos to do”. I don’t really think absolving them is necessary since you already have enough enemies to kill in the first place, therefore showering you with more souls. I guess it’s up to you what you’d want to do, but punishing seems to look cooler and doesn’t involve the useless cross.
Speaking of crosses, the rest of the floor collapses and then a cross does. You have to jump onto the cross quickly and then run across it before leaping to the safety of a ledge in the wall before the cross falls into Hell. Seems kind of stupid to me that you’re trying not to go into Hell but you’ll ultimately end up there anyway. So, now you can open up a chest, I mean a fountain, and get some health if you lost any. I don’t think Dante remembers how to drink from fountains, mainly because he busts it open and somehow gets health. Maybe if the scythe turned into a cup? I don’t know, this game is too much like God of War even when it doesn’t make sense.
Next, you slide down a stone pole or something, and now you’re beginning your descent into Hell itself. Where you drop is another problem that I have with this demo. You’re dropped onto a long ledge with a wheel that’s moving very slowly towards spikes. Once again, this seems an awful lot like God of War. However, when God of War did it, you had nowhere to go but forward since you were trapped. In Dante’s Inferno, that is not the case at all. A gate goes up to trap you, but there is nothing stopping you from getting to the opposite side of the ledge on the other side. It’s an L shape, so it’s not like the air will hold you back. Oh, wait, it will. Of course, another invisible barrier pops up and you’re forces to kill your opponents before the wheel smashes your body into the spikes. Why are there even spikes next to a gate? It doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, after that stupid bit, you’re trapped again by burning wood from above and have to fight fire demons. They’re spawned from the fire (like I thought all demons were) and you’re made to use the cross on them. So, blasting them with the blue, holy light turns them into stone as if they’ve been hit by Euralye’s head from God of War. From there, you smash them with your scythe and repeat to do so until the burning logs go away. From there, your path takes you to another ledge, but the catch this time is that there’s fire bursting through cracks in the wall. Who designed this stuff? It doesn’t make any sense. But yeah, you can get through that pretty easily as long as you follow the pattern.
After that, you meet up with a ghost in front of a door that’s dressed like Julius Caesar. Dante exclaims that he has no idea what it is, but then a moment later he realizes it’s Virgil and that he’s a poet. It is not explained in the game so far as to how he knew that, but I guess he just knew it after a few seconds. Virgil tells him about Beatrice saying something, and we get more boobs. Well, Dante says that if there’s anything he can do to help her, he will. This pans out a bit and you wait a few seconds to return to the gameplay. You’re introduced to magic at this time, but it’s basically a dash that leaves behind a frozen trail. Man, that’s so cool, I wish it would actually do something. Anyways, after slashing through the same demons you’ve been killing, you finally get to face off against a different one. Do you remember that scene in Hellboy where he became Anung Oon Rama or something like that? Where the apocalypse was going on and the squid was flailing in the sky and Hellboy had long horns? Yeah, that’s this monster. He’s pretty much a minotaur from God of War.
Once the little guys are out of the way, you finally get to beat up a giant werewolf. When I say “giant”, I don’t mean “giant”. I mean “gargantuan”. The thing is pretty big, towering over Dante and making the rider on its back look quite small. Well, after slashing at the werewolf for a while, you can grab onto it and a quicktime even happens so you can kill the rider and ride the beast yourself. This is really the only interesting part of the demo for me. Hopping on the back of a great Hell-beast like it’s a cyclops and pummeling my enemies to death with its fists, stomping feet and then fire. Wait a minute. Are the demons from Hell (keyword) not spawned from fire? I mean, when they rise up from the ground, it looks kind of like they’re climbing up from cinders and stuff. When they die, they bust into cinders and ash. So, why would fire hurt demons? It doesn’t make sense. After you kill all of the demons, you’re prompted to open the door that has been looming behind you the entire time. Quicktime event to open it, and then the demo ends.
I’ve learned something from this: a blatant rip-off of God of War can be terrible. Now, while this is only the impression I got from the demo, I’d honestly like to see what the rest of the game is about. So, that means you can pretty much expect a review of the actual game that is well over the 1300 words in this one. There’s no star rating here since this isn’t the finished product. Once I play through the actual game, I will give a rating on it.
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