The good: This game is "Inspired" by the epic poem of the same name but history buffs familiar with the source material you may question their design choices with the game at certain points but it definately gives you the "going through the bowels of hell" vibe the developers were going after. the meat of the game is your standard god of war style hack and slash action with occasional quick time events to break up the manotony the main gimmick of the game is that you can punish (brutally kill) or absolve (Purify) enemies and certain other npc's to give boosts to your Unholy (Scythe) powers or your Holy (Cross based powers).
The game play overall is very well balanced and fair although those who like doing 100% completion runs may curse the game on the first play-through as certain relic items used to modify stats and background attributes like how many souls you get for punishments and absolutions among other actions, tend to be placed in locations that may be impossible to get to on the first run through.
Although in spite of how well balanced the game is there are occasional moments where the game will randomly proceed to lean back and give you a one finger salute by way of either throwing you into battle with little to no health and no available regeneration fountains (which take several seconds of button mashing to draw out the health. the action granting you no invincibility frames to do it with. and yes you can be knocked out of the animation for drawing from the health fountain such that you have to start again. there is an item acquired later in the game that breaks the fountains upon use but it seems to lessen the amount of health received from the fountain when used.) the above also applies to mana and soul fountains which also need to be broken through a button mashing sequence.
The bad: Some of the above can hamper enjoyment of the game if your easily frustrated but if you have a sense of pride in your gaming prowess something that will frustrate you even more is the idea that the game on occasion (usually after dying a few times) the game will condescendingly remind you that the difficulty can be changed in the options menu which can be accessed with the back button on the Xbox 360 version and select on the Playstation 3. EVEN AT POINTS WHEN THE DIFFICULTY ADJUSTMENT WOULDN'T MATTER!!! (Certain areas having instant death traps which i doubt changing the difficulty would effect.)
The verdict: Dante's Inferno is a good game, is it a triple a block buster on the same tier as god of war, not quite. is it still good based on its own merits. if you can deal with some moments of hair pulling frustration and the game occasionally condescending to you when you've messed up once too many you'll generally like this game. is it a god of war killer? No. Was it made to be? possibly.
Overall I give Dante's Inferno 4 stars out of 5.
