Dante's Inferno Demo

Well initial impressions were a little meh, but overall impressions after finishing the demo are pretty good.

Story wise the demo leaves a whole lot to be desired, and if like me you don't follow every single detail of a game pre-release, so as not to spoil it for yourself, then you are left wondering what the hell is going on. Hopefully in the full version it will be somewhat more fleshed out, and the demo isn't simply the start of the game as it would be with the final product, because then I might be a little bit miffed.

The first thing you notice of course is the blistering frame rate, which didn't falter even once throughout the entire demo. Plenty of action happening on screen, but nothing over the top in the usual Japanese fashion, like Bayonetta, where you ask yourself what the hell (lol) is actually going on.

At the beginning I was very worried about the combat, since it felt almost more braindead than God of War. Now I'll be the first to admit that I prefer these games casual, and the likes of Ninja Gaiden and even Devil May Cry sometimes generally put me off, but at the same time God of War feels a little too button bashy at times. When you first encounter death, it's nothing more than a block anything and attack everything affair at which point I was wondering if there even was a countering system.

Fortunately by the time you get to unlocking abilities countering is the first thing that gets introduced, but you have no use for it until you get to your first medium-sized enemies which are unblockable. Up until that point you can pretty much stop anything with a block, which makes the game feel very dumbed down, but that improves very quickly.

I don't particularly like the fact that I need to bash B repeatedly to pick up health, mana and other substances, and this always irritated me in God of War as well, as it seems completely redundant and serves no purpose other than cocking up your controllers in the long run.

Boss and mini-boss battles generally turn into a mini-game affair when their health bars hit rock bottom, but a very cool ability for this genre which I haven't seen before is the chance to hijack beasts and then use them against your enemies. Controlling said beasts could have been better, but it's still pretty good fun in an almost Grand Theft Auto kind of way.

Sound isn't bad either, nothing noteworthy to mention really, but nothing glaringly irritating either. I did find that the video sequences were a whole lot softer than the actual in game sound which could be irritating, but will hopefully be normalised for the retail version of the game.

Overall the demo doesn't quite have the epic feel of God of War. There's no massive Hydra as a first boss, or massive Titans to conquer. Actually, Death, the first boss like character is only about double your size. The trailer videos at the end of the demo do allude to things getting a whole lot more interesting, so it's probably just a case of not giving it all away.

If you happen to own both consoles or a PS3 only, then I can imagine choosing between God of War and Dante's Inferno could become quite troublesome, but as a 360-only owner it's really a no-brainer for me.