Dante's Inferno (computer game)
| Dante's inferno | |||
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| Studio |
 Visceral Games Artificial Mind and Movement
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| Publisher |
Electronic Arts
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| Erstveröffent- lichung |
Playstation 3 February 4th 2010 Xbox 360 February 9th 2010 PlayStation Portable February 9th 2010 |
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| platform | PlayStation 3 , Xbox 360 , PlayStation Portable | ||
| genre | Action adventure | ||
| medium | Blu-ray Disc , DVD-ROM , UMD , download | ||
| language | German, English, Spanish | ||
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Dante's Inferno is an action-adventure published by Electronic Arts and developed by Visceral Games (formerly EA Redwood Shores). Visceral Games worked with Artificial Mind and Movement for the PSP implementation . In this game, the player takes control of the crusader Dante , whom he accompanies from a third-person perspective on his descent into the 9 circles of hell. The game is based on the first book of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy , The Inferno. The story of the game was written by Will Rokos, who also worked for the movie Monster's Ball . An untitled, self-created engine from EA was used, with which the games James Bond 007: Greetings from Moscow , The Godfather and Dead Space were developed.
action
Dante, a veteran of the Crusades , is guilty of various war crimes while serving in the Holy Land . After he last killed some Persian prisoners who he should have been guarding during a battle in Acre , he was stabbed from behind himself. When Dante dies, death itself appears to take Dante's soul and make him atone for his sins in hell. However, Dante, convinced of the correctness of his deeds through false promises of salvation and forgiveness by the bishop, denies himself his fate and faces death for battle. Dante can finally snatch his huge scythe from him and defeat him.
Back from the realm of the dead, he turns his back on the crusades and sews a fabric cross on his chest as atonement for his deeds, on which his sins are depicted. He returns to Florence to live with his lover Beatrice , but finds her and his father Alighiero murdered there.
When Beatrice's soul rises from her body to go to heaven, Lucifer appears , the ruler of hell, and pulls her with him into the darkness. He plans to marry her soul to get out of hell and to knock God off his throne. In a nearby church, Dante blesses Beatrice's cross, which she gave him on his departure for the Holy Land, but has to watch as Lucifer kidnaps Beatrice with him into hell. With the help of the cross he can open the gates to hell through an opening crater and goes down into the gullet to save Beatrice.
Equipped with the scythe of death and Beatrice's cross, Dante successively crosses the nine circles of hell and has to face many different opponents and trials, all of which represent the corresponding circle of hell in which they can be found. Among other things, he faces the ferryman Charon , the Hades judge King Minos , the Egyptian queen Cleopatra , his own father and Beatrice's brother Francesco, who was hanged instead of Dante for the massacre of the prisoners in Acre. Dante is guided on his journey by the Roman poet Virgil , who assists Dante with explanations and advice. On the way he also meets the damned souls of famous, sometimes notorious men and women of history, such as B. Pontius Pilate , the Babylonian Queen Semiramis or the Hun King Attila , whom Dante can either give absolution to with his cross or condemn them to eternal damnation with his scythe.
The story also reveals that Beatrice made a pact with Lucifer after Lucifer told her that Dante had cheated on her with another woman during the war. That woman wanted to buy her and her brother's freedom. However, it turns out that the brother was in fact the woman's husband and killed Beatrice and Alighiero in revenge. However, Dante is ultimately able to redeem Beatrice after agreeing to make the ultimate sacrifice and take her place in Hell.
At the end of his journey, Dante has to face his own sins, his past and the war crimes he has committed and faces Lucifer in the decisive duel. After he was able to win the fight and impale Lucifer on the scythe of death, the latter reveals to him that Dante actually died in the knife attack at the beginning and was the only way to descend into hell. In addition, it was once God personally forbade that a damned soul should ever leave hell again. But Dante can redeem himself with the help of the many souls that he has collected in the course of his journey and lock Lucifer again in his hell prison. In the end, Dante, who with his victory prevented Lucifer from taking over heaven, is finally allowed to gain redemption through purgatory and disappear into heaven with his lover Beatrice.
Gameplay
Dante's preferred weapon is a scythe that he snatched from death himself (as shown in the game's opening scene). However, he can also fall back on magical support. So he carries with him a sacred cross that Beatrice gave him before her death, with the help of which he can send rays of light that can injure and defeat all evil within their reach. Dante is also able to tame larger beasts and with their help impale opponents, burn them or make use of other properties of the respective demon .
As a special feature, Dante can give absolution to various souls during his journey , or send them into eternal damnation, and thus collect points that are allocated to either his righteousness or his wickedness - the more points flow into righteousness, the stronger the attacks become his sacred cross. If more points are placed on the malicious side, the attacks with Dante's scythe are intensified. In addition, a variety of additional combos and magical attacks can be unlocked and Dante's health and mana can be improved.
In the course of the game, the player also finds various artifacts, the different properties of which increase Dante's abilities or even grant him new abilities. Furthermore, three so-called "Beatrice stones" can be found in the game, which are inserted into the cross in order to redeem damned souls automatically and without the previous mini-game. In addition, the 30 silver coins that Judas were once paid for betraying Jesus are hidden in the game. However, they have no effect on the game and are only of a cosmetic nature, but collecting all 30 coins is rewarded with an Xbox Live success or a PSN trophy.
A demo version of the game was released for download on December 23, 2009 on the German Xbox Live marketplace and the PS network.
Additional content
Shortly after the game was released, the "Dark Forest" expansion was released. In this content, which is linked to the opening scene of the game and is therefore to be understood as the prologue of the actual main game, Dante fights his way through the dark forest against new monsters and with new puzzles.
As a second expansion, the content "The Trials of Saint Lucia" was published, with which a two-player mode was added to the game, in which one player takes over Dante and the other Lucia. Together, both have to overcome prefabricated spaces and challenges.
With these expansions, several alternative costumes for Dante were released in the main game, which can be changed on the Beatrice statues, on which the game is also saved. In addition, various "soul packs" have been released, which give the player a certain number of souls right at the beginning to improve his skills. However, each soul pack can only be downloaded once.
Reviews
- “Good God of War clone that shows weaknesses on the home stretch.” - (84%) Games Aktuell 03/2010
- “The peculiar beauty of the game makes us ignore gameplay without ideas - but not the fact that we often find it tasteless.” - (without end note) GEE 02/2010
- “The Pop Art variant of the 'Divine Comedy' scores with a nightmarish ambient look that goes very well with the weird, sometimes ingeniously drawn opponents. However, the degree of violence, death and annihilation shown is only for adults - and certainly not to everyone's taste. ” 2 (school grade 1.86) Computerbild Spiele 03/2010
- “Even if the setting and story fit and Visceral has borrowed a lot of great things from Sony's God of War in terms of gameplay, Dante's Inferno cannot easily put the PS2 and soon also probably PS3 flagship game in his pocket. ... " - (85%) Consol Plus 02/2010
Movie
An animated film called Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic was released in May 2010 and directed by Mike Disa. Similar to Animatrix and Batman: Gotham Knight, the film was produced by several drawing studios (such as Manglobe or Dongwoo Animation). Critics praised the high quality of the drawings and criticized the level of violence.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Robinson, Martin: Dante's Inferno for PSP (English) . In: IGN.com . April 22, 2009. Retrieved April 23, 2009.
- ↑ [1] report on www.golem.de. Retrieved December 2, 2009
- ^ [2] Report from www.computerbild.de of December 24, 2009. Retrieved on January 1, 2010
- ↑ sofahelden.com : Film review from May 27, 2010 (accessed on May 13, 2012)
- ↑ blurayreviews.ch : Film review from July 11, 2010 (accessed on May 13, 2012)
Web links
- Publisher's product page