I downloaded the demo a while back and am not too impressed. It’s looks good and I really like the concept (how can I not get excited about fighting unbaptized babies?) but a couple of things and putting me off:
1: I hate the way Dante himself looks. Hugely muscular does not make him a better character.
2: I didn’t like not being able to move the camera around. Unlike every single other (good) game out there, R3 causes Dante to move quickly in whatever direction you chose, instead of that being the button to control the camera.
3 and the biggest: I hate quicktime events. And it isn’t every once and a while. On more than one occasion I fought the boss for ten minutes, and when I finally think I have him beat, I got a, to steal from Yahtzee, “click square to not die” flash on the screen. Very annoying.
I was interested in the game from a literary perspective - I wanted to see how it was all visualized on the screen. I heard a pretty good review from this perspective in NPR; however, they did not address gameplay issues. I don’t think I have the hardware to do the game justice, unfortunately.
I bought the game yesterday after trying the demo. (PS3)
It is nothing like the poem, other than the basic concept. Dante is a Crusader under Richard the Lionheart, for one. You just have to not take the whole thing seriously - it’s like someone read a Sparknotes version of Inferno while they were high and liberally added blood and nudity whenever possible.
The quicktime events can get annoying. You have to get used to paying attention to the screen while fighting bosses, otherwise you get screwed over pretty quickly. Luckily if you die, the game takes you back to the beginning of the battle rather than your last save point.
The fixed camera is also annoying and caused me quite some grief early on in the game (I kept falling off cliffs when I absentmindedly tried to adjust the camera angle), but like any game controls you adapt.
But all in all, it’s not bad. The story is interesting enough, and the visualization of Hell is pretty impressive. I’ve heard a lot of complaints that it’s too similar to God of War, but I’ve never played that game so I can’t really say.
Summary: the gameplay is nothing amazing - just hack and slash, with a few random puzzles thrown in - but it’s not bad either. The visuals are cool. The storyline will make readers of the original raise their eyebrows, but it’s an interesting reinterpretation. It’s not a brilliant game, but it’s a FUN game.
