Sheer hell

by ERIK LEIJON

Just prior to the long-awaited release of Sony’s God of War III, EA has been kind enough to send us to hell with Dante’s Inferno (PS3, X360/EA, Visceral); a game that plays exactly like God of War and looks a fair bit like it too, except featuring none of the inspired carnage of the source material. Originally, I was going to re-run a God of War review replacing the term “Ancient Greece” with “Crusades,” but beyond the overuse of outmoded 2005 slang, it was evident doing so would be like describing off-brand Corn Flakes with same zeal as the real McCoy.

If this review were a one-liner, I would cheekily state Dante’s Inferno both looks and plays like sheer hell. It’s apt, although in the case of the former, it is intended as a compliment. Set during the Crusades (and vaguely inspired by the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is included here in the form of a scrolling credit roll), a returning warrior named Dante is in hell, fighting for the release of his frequently bare-chested wife Beatrice. The abode of the damned features endless pools of floating bodies and the colour scheme is understandably dark, but not unlike recent visual-heavy action title Bayonetta (and, to some extent, even God of War), the environments can’t be interacted with, thus keeping the omnipresent hellfire and brimstone at an unintended distance. The cutscenes—both the 2D animated and 3D ones—are fast, gory and stylish, a pacing and motif Dante’s Inferno should have adopted throughout.

God of War’s simple yet graceful weapon-slashing combat has been mimicked to death, with Dante’s Inferno perhaps the most uninspired re-appropriation yet. Dante walks along heavily linear paths, intermittently getting sucked into fights against undead enemies in temporarily cordoned-off arenas. The infernal baddies are oversized, well-detailed and come with corresponding quicktime killing cinematic sequences (which feel especially stale here), but sadly Dante’s Inferno is the umpteenth game to employ hundreds of skeleton warriors and an ugly three-headed monster named Cerberus.

As for the controversy surrounding the gore, there is an award for killing babies with hooks for hands, but the game is so over-the-top, it’s impossible to imagine anyone being offended other than Beelzebub himself, no doubt appalled by the forgettable portrayal of his kingdom.

Naughty looking nice

It’s true one catches more bears with honey than with vinegar, so consider Montreal developer A2M’s latest Naughty Bear (X360, PS3/505, A2M) and its highly acerbic titular character to be a bit of an anomaly. Naughty Bear began as a more mature

project sans the cute anthropomorphic forest dwellers, although the A2M team’s idea to build a reactive, randomly acting artificial intelligence has transformed him into Paddington Bear with less marmalade and more maiming.

A cartoonishly violent strategy game, Naughty Bear’s sole purpose is to terrorize his fellow bears any way possible, whether through very direct physical assaults (the bear is well-versed in armed combat) to sabotaging his neighbours’ houses and cars. Similar to the Punisher game adaptation, there are specific items the sociopathic beast can interact with to cause further misery, such as slamming heads against car doors or tampering with electrical boxes. Cute plush animals aside, the violence can get dark: traumatized bears are inclined to commit suicide when the chiding gets too excessive. The enemy bears don’t act or move in any set pattern, so every mission can in theory play out differently. A2M is hoping for it to be the case, since much of the game’s value is tied to replaying the chapters to improve one’s high score. Naughty Bear is expected to hit stores this summer.