It would be easy to dismiss Dante’s Inferno as a God of War clone. The color pallet is very similar and the combat, featuring a burly hero slicing away at minions of hell, can’t help but draw comparisons to Kratos and his quest. But despite these similarities, Dante’s Inferno, a re-imagining of The Divine Comedy, seems very capable of establishing its own unique identity as a strong action game.

After returning from battling in the Crusades, the protagonist Dante returns to find that his beloved fiancé, Beatrice, is dead and has been seduced by Lucifer. Not one to let his woman be taken from him, Dante decides to make his way to hell to free his love from the clutches of Lucifer. Of course, getting into hell is easy. Fighting the devil and his minions doesn’t seem so simple.

The demonstration opened with Dante fighting swarms of minions on Charon’s boat as he ferries the dead to the underworld. Swarms of hellish demons come at Dante from every direction, but fortunately he’s armed with Death’s scythe which allows him to quickly dispatch his foes before they can use their numbers to overwhelm him. Additionally, Dante is armed with a Holy Cross that gives him a ranged attack he can use to keep enemies at bay. The combat system seemed to combine the best elements of Prince of Persia and God of War, offering fast-paced, acrobatic, ceaseless combat that ran at a constant 60fps.

After easily dispatching scores of minor minions, Dante then encountered a hulking beast ridden by one of Lucifer’s minions. The team then demonstrated how Dante can take control of Hell’s various beasts of burden. By taking out the rider, Dante was able to commandeer the beast and easily use its power to destroy Charon.

The team has taken many of the elements of the Divine Comedy to tell the story. We were told that the poem’s descriptions of hell made it incredibly easy to translate it into a game. All of the characters from the play are present, including Vergil who narrates the story. But though familiar characters do appear, most have been re-imagined into darker, more violent versions bent on killing our hero. Minos, the blind judge of hell who decides which circle to send the dead, attacks Dante ruthlessly with crushing fists and an army of unbaptized children until Dante can finally dispatch him through a seamless scripted event.

One of the things that caught my attention most during our demo was the level design. Areas cleanly transition into one another as Dante leaves a wake of destruction behind him as he progresses further into the depths of hell. The world is literally crumbling around him as he works his way through thematic levels centered on the sins of the flesh. Though obviously a very linear game, Dante’s Inferno looked more open than other titles in the genre, while still retaining the same style and feel.

There are a wide variety of enemies to dispatch as you fight through the game, but I couldn’t help but feel that the game would get repetitive fast during our demo. It seemed to me like there was a whole lot of button mashing going on. The depth of the combat system wasn’t fully explored, but it seemed to me that the formula behind the game was simple: throw a ton of enemies at the player, wait until they kill them all, give them access to the next area, and repeat. Occasionally add in a boss battle or a platforming sequence. I worry that, without much diversity, this will be a game we’ll only want to play through once or twice.

That said, this was a very early look at a game set to come out in 2010. Hopefully the developers will add some variety to the game, though I will admit that it’s fair to expect a lot of fighting when you’re literally trying to take down Lucifer himself. As of now, Dante’s Inferno is a gorgeous game with a lot of potential to become a high-profile action game of 2010. Let’s just hope that there’s more to it than just mashing the attack button the whole time.