Game: Dante's Inferno (Visceral Games, 2010)

For anyone who’s played the God of War series, Dante’s Inferno will most likely be met with cries of “Rip-Off”. So ashamedly does it utilise the Greek badass’ formula that you could actually be mistaken for thinking you were playing a legitimate spin off rather than an entirely separate game. The thing is, making a game so similar to God of War, as this proves, is not such a bad thing. True, it aint as good as its Playstation counterpart, but in basing a game on part 1 of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series, has fashioned a game that displays sickening imagination, whilst sticking surprisingly rigid to the main narrative of the original text.

It has flaws, not least in the latter half, where is seems the imagination wanes somewhat. For example: the 8th circle of hell (Fraud) consists only of ten consecutive battle arenas that must be completed before continuing, which is nowhere near as fulfilling as, say, the 3rd circle (Gluttony) in which the surroundings take on the guise of grotesquely misshapen body parts.

Yet despite being somewhat anticlimactic toward the end, it’s difficult to argue with a game that plays as well as this. As with all good hack ‘n’ slashers, you are able to pull off endlessly impressive moves with the simplest of commands and there is enough variety in the combat to keep the player on their toes. Sure, it’s God of War under a different name but, really, is that necessarily a bad thing?

4/5