Since I have recently acquired a PS3, might as well make use of the exclusivity that it brings, starting with the demo for Dante’s Inferno. Xbox 360 owners won’t get it until the 24th.
A couple of notes while playing through the demo.
It could be that because I’m playing through the God of War: Collection, but this game feels amazingly similar to God of War.
The hack-and-slash combat, quick time events, lightning fast combat, the cinematic-style fixed camera angles, the button tips that pop up from time to time… all eerily similar to God of War.
Some of the button placements are 1 to 1.
- Square = Light Attack
- Triangle = Heavy Attack
- X = Jump
- Left Stick = Movement
- Right Stick = Evade
- Left Buttons = Flipped around
- God of War was L1 for Block, L2 for Magic
The meters, while similar, show a bit of evolution in the button mashing gameplay of God of War.
There are two trees of abilities, Unholy and Holy, that you can climb. As you reach a certain level, you unlock abilities by spending the souls (number shown in the center of the screen).
And this is where it gets annoying. After grabbing an unfortunate or fortunate entity via R2, you either can tap Square to Punish or rapidly hit Circle to Absolve to gain EXP in either the Holy or Unholy tree, respectively. I know, the note actually doesn’t tell you that you have to do this, but there’s a distinction between Punishing and Absolving. Maybe it’s actually harder to absolve souls in RL? 
I feel like this is a poor game mechanic. Rather than making the focus of the combat “killing stuff”, now you have to grab and punish/absolve over and over again. Isn’t the point of a hack-and-slash to get that exciting emotion as you plow through a massive number of enemies or take down a behemoth? Blah.
One random comment on Blocking: I like how blocking preempts all actions in Dante’s Inferno. It makes the game feel different, if not a bit easier at the beginning, because rather than thinking about how an enemy’s attack will affect the timing of your moves to react and block, you can just slam on the R2 when you see it coming. With God of War, I would get hit much more often because I was in the middle of a chain combo.
Verdict? I probably won’t go out of my way to play this game. It doesn’t seem like it’s offering anything that new, and I just played through both God of War I and II… I’m pretty much Kratos’d out. I guess there’s always God of War III…