Many moons ago Brake For Frogger started life as a printed fanzine. We had a page at the back with a whole load of made up games rumours that we, rather childishly, thought would be spread around by the unwitting. A lot of them started with the words ‘EA have bought the rights to…’.
‘EA have bought the rights to The Bay City Rollers’
‘EA have bought the rights to your Mum’
‘EA have bought the rights to Weston Super Mare’
They got more and more stupid as the idea went on. Imagine my shock then when I read a while ago that EA had bought the rights to Dante’s Inferno. It’s one thing to have a movie license in the bag but a license based on a poem seemed a little far fetched. Last night, whilst round at Tom’s, we got the chance to have a blast of the demo recently release on Xbox Live and the Playstation Network.
The Eighth Circle of Hell, if the poem had one, would be plagiarism on this evidence as Dante’s Inferno is a complete God of War rip to the point when the controls are exactly the same. It isn’t to suggest that the demo gives the impression of a bad game as I’m a fan of GoW but Dante doesn’t have an original bone in his hell bound body. It’s hack and slash which is done very well and looks amazing but I don’t think there was a combo meter in the original text.
The demo is actually quite generous, taking you up to the Gates of Hell itself which takes in the first half hour or so of the game proper. Dante returns from battle to find his wife murdered and her soul being carted off to the fiery depths so that Lucifer can have his way with her. Dante decides this isn’t on because he was absolved of all his sins so he marches into Hell to get her back. Obviously, any proper depiction of Hell has to go full throttle on the damnation front so Dante’s Inferno will be an 18 rated game on release. Sadly it would seem this has given the developers an excuse to chuck a few breast shots in there just for good measure which sometimes feels a tad unneccessary.
Hell does look amazing though and graphically the game is set to stun but the carbon copy gameplay irks slightly. Obviously with the PS3 having God of War 3 then Dante might be in for an easier ride on the 360 but it remains to be seen if taking a high profile piece of literature and turning it into an action videogame will result in a best seller.
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