I'm baffled by the reviews coming in for it.
Visceral Games (the developer) are trying their darndest to take the "literary high road", but all of their claims about how this is a solid interpretation of Dante Aligheri's work is preposterous. This is the same developer group who decided upon an extremely tacky ad campaign; not to mention that one of the monsters in the game literally throws dicks at you as a weapon.
But reading reviews for the game, the critics gloss over all of this. "Oh, the story blows," they'll say, but no one is docking marks for that – they're more concerned about the fact that the play mechanics are similar to God of War. Wait, um, what? Isn't the fact that this game is based upon a classic epic poem its sole defining feature? To not discuss that seems really… well, ignorant, almost. Sure, the game might not be that great in the originality of play mechanics department, but when such a focus has been put on the story by the developers, and they've totally fucked with said story, doesn't that deserve at least some sort of analysis or even a mention in terms of their scoring for the review?
I'm going to leave the review of the game to my XBox-owning cohorts, but I'm really curious to see just how they made Dante into an action hero (even though he's plagued by self-doubt and inaction in the poem).
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Oop, I found a good one: http://presspausetoreflect.blogspot.com/2010/01/dantes-inferno-failure-on-two-fronts.html
Oh god, and how did I forget about this: http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/ea-blasted-over-questionable-marketing-stunt/1338121
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the whole tacking on of Dante's epic to this game itself is really just window dressing. I'm actually more interested as to whether or not as a game it performs as well as the God of War series, given Visceral Games pedigree established by their previous entry: Dead Space. While Dead Space liberally borrowed, if not outright stole, elements of the survival horror genre developed and refined by the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series of games, it really brought together all of the elements which made those games great into a title which felt, if not familiar, exemplary of the very best which the survival horror genre has had to offer. Additionally, that the entire menu system in the game played out in real-time, as well as the so-called "zero gravity" segments of the game, gave Dead Space just enough originality to separate itself from the rest of the survival horror genre and carve a gory little niche for itself in the blackness of space.
I was hoping that Dante's Inferno would do basically the same for the God of War style action game. Since I haven't played the game yet in it's entirety, I can neither confirm nor deny whether it accomplishes this. That being said: the demo was boring as fuck, and the God of War games are never boring.
Epic poetry fail?
Yeah, Dead Space did seem really interesting (and by interesting, I mean "scary as all hell", this coming from the guy who had his head chopped off in Resident Evil 4 and didn't play the game again for another six months because of fear).
As for how Dante's Inferno compares to God of War, from what I understand, most people are seeing DI as something to hold them over until God of War 3 comes out.