Genre: Action

Platform: PlayStation 3

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Classification: 18 (PEGI)

Dante arrives home from the long crusade, tired and in much need of some 'me time', He discovers something terrible, a scene not too dissimilar to the one from the film Gladiator. Our hero’s wife is found murdered in the gardens, her body left to be feasted upon by the ravenous birds and disgusting maggots.

For all his wrongdoings whilst he was away, Lucifer takes Dante's wife’s soul into the underworld with him. But being the well-oiled war-machine that he is, Dante follows her into hell with the intention of bringing her back.

It's an all action hack-and-slash that is not necessarily original but rarely places a foot wrong. Dante's scythe whizzes around the screen at lightning speed, decapitating his already dead enemies like an apocalyptic guillotine forged in the fires of hell.

As with many action games in this ilk, the main character is customisable. Players use their hard earned experience points to utilise the fairly in-depth stat tree enabling Dante to learn new moves, gain new abilities and harness new magical attacks.

There are also quicktime button-pressing events used sparingly enough to ensure that they don't become a hindrance but more of a compliment. When Dante savagely slices open a large beast, the quicktime event unfolds.

Level design is generally of an exceptional quality, with a journey through each of the nine circles of hell as described in Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy. Each circle looks dramatically different to the last but always as equally beautiful in a hellish kind of way.

The sound helps to further enrich the experience by delivering harrowing and chilling screams in the background. But whilst helping to absorb the player into the game, these same sounds can be a distraction at times of dialogue-heavy narrative.

There's little doubt that this will be compared to God of War, the similarities are endless. Admittedly it doesn't feel quite as slick, but for the moment, it will easily do as a stopgap until God of War 3 hits the shelves.

Unlike Bayonetta's PS3 outing that was plagued by poor loading times until the recent patch, the load times in Dante's Inferno are kept to an absolute bare-minimum, ensuring that the player has a smooth, non-stop ride through this stomach-churning hell.

A stay in hell is meant to last a long time – certainly not here. And that’s my only real gripe. If it were longer, I would be singing about Dante's Inferno from the rooftops. It really is an amazing but incredibly short game.

Dante's Inferno is extremely violent and extremely perverse. More importantly though, it's extremely good.

SCORE 8 / 10