Thanks to the recent sale at Toysrus I picked up Dante’s Inferno to add it to my every growing collection of action games. I would normally do a complete analysis of the game but I can actually condense my problems into a quick list. If I was wittier I could link these to the seven deadly sins, but I’m not so we’ll just have to settle for a list.
1. Clumsy Combat: Right off the bat I could tell that DI was not in the running for best action title and the combat system is exhibit A. You have a light attack, a strong attack and throwing holy magic at enemies. The problem with the system is that it leaves much to be desire, there are no true combos unlocked from the start (more on that later) and fighting feels very repetitive. Another issue is how you interact with enemies, basically you can stop them from attacking if you strike first, however if an enemy begins their attack animation you cannot knock them out of it.
This quickly becomes a problem as the player is constantly assaulted by foes from every angle and makes getting into close combat very dangerous. One enemy was designed that if you keep attacking, it will dash away quickly then dash back to you and hit you with a three hit combo. Once again you can’t knock them out of this animation and if you are stuck in your own combo animation you are going to be hit every time. When playing on hard these foes hit for a lot of damage and I’ve been killed countless times because of it.
2. Holy/Unholy: This is one of those ideas that I can’t help but feel that the designers thought they were being clever with. You have two different skill trees in DI, one unholy and one holy. Different enemies you can finish off by either purifying them or destroying them which give you holy or unholy experience respectively. Get enough experience and you unlock a new tier in that tree which you can spend souls to unlock skills.
The problem is that instead of offering customization what the designers did was split the player’s available moves down the middle. The holy tree gives improvement to your cross ability while the unholy tree unlocks more combos. With how limited the move set is from the start I really question this decision. Going back to my first point it is safer to deal damage from afar with the cross skills and there is even a spell that gets unlock that recovers health and decreases damage. This makes the holy tree a safer option and just limits what you can do in game.
3. Camera concerns: The camera is not on your side while playing DI as most of the time it seems to focus on the environment and not Dante. The game features several sections that have the player jumping across platforms with the camera making it hard to gauge your jumps. To make matters worse it does not track the player during combat, I’ve fought enemies off screen while Dante is off screen as well.
4. Chameleon character: Having a camera that doesn’t keep track of the character is bad enough, having a character that blends into the background in an action game is just kicking the player when they’re down. The majority of the environments take place in caverns with colors that match it, which also are the same for Dante. I’ve lost track of Dante numerous times during combat as the designers didn’t see fit to make him stand out in the world. I don’t have this problem with games like God of War of Bayonetta where the protagonist is a ghost white bad-ass with a red stripe down his body or a super model who loses clothes as the fight wears on.
5. The wrong use of regeneration: Having full bars of health, magic and Dante’s retribution mode (think devil mode from Devil May Cry) can mean the difference of winning and losing in DI. There are fountains scattered around that can recover some of your health or magic bars but not all of them. Another mechanic the designers thought they were being clever with was if you keep dying to the same section they will slowly fill your bars on reload of the checkpoint.
The problem with this is what happens when you just barely won a fight and now you have to fight again a few minutes later with low health? What happens is that you will die from having less then max health and will have to keep repeating the section until the game decides to fill your health bar. Some encounters focus mainly on using magic spells and if you don’t have enough then you are SOL there until you die enough times for the game to throw you a bone.
With annoying fights in DI (more on that later) I’m surprised that the designers just don’t have the supply fountains restore full health or magic and save the player the time of getting their head beat in.
6. Check point confusion : Saving and check points in DI add another layer of frustration. The game checkpoints your progress allowing to restart at specific intervals if you die and also has save points that the player can save their game The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to where the save points are most of the time. For example one section that took me about twenty minutes to get through full of annoying fights had no saves there, then another part had two save points about 5 minutes from each other.
This becomes frustrating for a gamer that has time constraints as if they are stuck on the third fight in a series of difficult sections and they have to leave, and then they will have to start back at square one on return.
I always favor games having a quick save option that deletes on load allowing the player to leave at any time and return exactly to where they left off.
7. Imbalanced fighting: My last point comes from a culmination of the problems with DI’s combat. When I talked about the action genre a few months ago I mentioned the concept of a “base-line” which was determining the absolute maximum encounter in an action game that a player can win easily. The importance of this was it allows the designers to balance their fights with the game-play and not create sections that go against the strength of the game.
The problem with DI is that from all the issues I have with the combat as mentioned in previous points, it makes the majority of the encounters very annoying to fight. Most fights have the player first fighting a really tough enemy, then fighting it again with friends, then maybe a third time for kicks. Encounters tend to drag on and the player is constantly put into fights that are just balanced against them, for example dealing with powerful close range enemies while long range enemies who aim very well attack you.
One of the best (or worse) examples comes later in the game that has Dante fighting an enemy who projects an anti cross magic barrier that won’t go away until he dies. This guy is joined by enemies who are normally immune to your scythe attacks until you hit them with the magic. You can just imagine how fun these fights are; now you can use your other magic to weaken them but if you are low on magic from a previous fight expect to see the game over screen a lot.
Boss fights also lack meaningful combat, the fights between larger enemies where the player must wait for the right time to attack to do damage are fine. However DI features fights with enemies the size of Dante that just become ten minute grudge matches as you just wail on them to drain their mountain of health. When playing on hard they can kill you in about three hits which turn these fights into a bore. I’m at the final fight now and my interest is starting to wane, especially how the final boss can hit me through my counter attack which is always fun.
It’s a shame about how much was off with DI, considering how much they were inspired from other action titles. Turns out when I did my original prediction last year of Bayonetta vs Dante’s Inferno I was on the money after playing both their game demos . DI is an example of how too many little problems can add up to one big mess.
Josh.
