Demo Review: Dante's Inferno

Yesterday I decided to go hog wild downloading demos off of XBox Live, wow, what a fantastic experience. I'm going to be playing little 15 minute vignette's of video games for quite some time. It's going to be a nice little time running through them and then agonizing over whether I'm going to buy them or not. Knowing me, by the time I'm done thinking about it we'll be on to a next gen system (XBox 1080?) and the games will be at a price so negligible I won't hesitate to purchase them.

Anywho...

The first game that I previewed was this little gem called Dante's Inferno. It's made by the same people who made current all time favorite video game experience Dead Space so I figured it had to be some sort of quality. And it is! Yay!

The game is some sort Streets of Rage/Devil May Cry kinda thing set during the Crusades so it has this interesting pseudo religious bent. The atmosphere is pretty sexy. The main character, Dante, is all kinds of overly serious, which I guess you have to be if you're running into Hell chasing after your dead wife who is accusing you of committing some kind of heinous crime which you're unaware of. Women, am I right? So it's interesting, because you get to run through these crazy settings and kill these crazy monsters in crazy ways. But the best part of the game, for me, was the first boss you fight. Oh yea, it's a goody. See, after running around murdering what appear to be some innocent peasants that you had locked in jail, you get to go toe to toe with this guy:

That's right kids, the first level boss is the Grim Reaper. I think it takes some serious stones to fight the embodiment of death. Is everyone going to do it? Probably. I certainly don't want to die, and if Death showed up at my door I'd probably try and have a little conversation with him about the worth of my life and the value that I bring to the lives of others, but I don't think I'd engage the man/entity in fisticuffs. Which is exactly what Dante does here. Moreso...

Dante steals the Reaper's scythe and jams him in the face with it! That is so awesome! "Oh, what's that Death? You want to take my soul to some kind of afterlife? Really. No, I'm gonna stay here, I've got some business to handle." So you murder Death. Then you get to use his scythe for the rest of the game. I imagine anyway, since it harvests the souls of the things you kill and you use those souls as currency for power ups. I'm calling badass.

So I love this bit of the game. I do. But I'm not sure if I want to buy it. I've never been all that into the button mashing beat 'em up games. There's something about the timing that I'm off on or the combo memorization. Will I pick this up? There's potential. But I think if you enjoy these types of games it's a must buy. The atmosphere is far too fun to pass up on.