SDCC 2009: Dante's Inferno Preview
Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 07.30.2009
SDCC '09 - Hands On: 411mania finally goes to Hell with one of the most awesome games of all time in an exclusive preview for new ultimate badass game, Dante's Inferno.
The playable demo at the convention allowed attendees to play the E3 build that EA only gave a video preview for at their booth. So you start on the river boat, where the ferryman Charon is actually the head of the river boat, to the kingdom of Limbo and fight a number of baddies. The controls are basically how it looks, this is very much a God of War style action game. The weapons at your disposal are Death's scythe and also Beatriz' cross. You can bludgeon your enemies with the cross, but you can also hold one of your action buttons down to charge it up and release some holy energy. Once you clear the enemies on the boat you have to defeat a giant sort of minotaur monster and you use the monster to rip off Charon's head.
Then you get to do one of the game's boss battles and fight Minos, King of Limbo. It was fun getting to play this awesome looking battle we could only see at E3. I actually died a few times, but once you get a hand of the sidestepping and rolls, its pretty much a cinch. You dodge the serpent tail of Minos, and then you are prompted by the cinematic action button prompts. Eventually you drag Minos' tongue to a spiked wheel, roll it, and drag Minos' head over it.
According to Phil Miernau of EA at the convention, the game will not have any load time and will move very fluidly. The demo continued with the rest of what was previewed from the E3 build, and you move to outside the City of Dis and get to fight some more of the monsters and demons from the other levels of Hell. The demo ends as you are able to get on top of a monster and walk it into the City of Dis as it pans out with some voice over of a passage directly from the original poem, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
Dante's Inferno is currently set for release on PS3, Xbox 360, and PSP for January 2010.
