Is Dante's Inferno Divine or a Comedy of Errors?

When people refer to a game like Conan or Heavenly Sword as a "God of War clone," they typically mean it's in the third-person hack-n-slash genre and shares a few features like the button-pressing minigames or camerawork or giant bosses. So for the sake of clarity, it's probably best not to call Dante's Inferno a "clone" and lump it in with those descriptions, because Dante's is as complete a forgery as games come, taking approximately 90% of its key features directly from Sony Santa Monica's game.

But because it copies those features with a lot more technical precision than most others that have tried, it's also pretty fun; the game just comes up a bit short at making them all gel together. God of War uses its tools to make you feel like you're on an adventure, constantly seeing new things and playing a key role in the story. Dante's Inferno feels like a bunch of well-designed combat rooms that happens to have a loose story wrapped around it.

Now, that story will likely be a big deal to many who pick up the game, given that it's based on the poem The Divine Comedy from the 1300s. You can argue back and forth about whether the game pays appropriate respect to the poem, or whether this is good source material for a video game in the first place, but what disappoints me most is that the story as a whole takes a backseat once you turn the game on. With an unusual mix of CG, in-game, and stick-figure cut-scenes, puzzles that don't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the game, Dance Dance Revolution-style minigames that pop up for when you "capture sins," and a gauntlet of "kill X under X conditions" challenges that the game forces on you towards the end of the story, there are a lot of distractions that pull you out of the experience. When the volume drops every time people start talking and rises every time you attack something, the game doesn't feel like it prioritizes the story.

Along those same lines, you'd think that centering the game on the nine circles of Hell from the poem would make for an amazing sense of progression, with the world changing around you as you make your way deeper and deeper, but most of the game looks pretty much the same. You'll run into a few memorable characters -- such as a boss that shoots evil babies from her nipples, and an enemy that defecates to attack -- but apart from minor references here and there, there aren't major differences between Anger, Gluttony, Greed, etc.