I seriously can't deal with GameSpot still having the wrong box art so I am going to just arbitrarily shove it in here. It may seem something silly to get worked up over but it's kind of one of my main tenets here: the art of this game is wonderful.
Anyone who played Dead Space should know that - Visceral simply makes splendid environments, they spare no expense whatsoever when it comes to atmosphere, and artwork for anything - enemies, settings, player character, you name it. If it's in the game, Visceral put a lot of effort into making it look absolutely wonderful.
So the same obviously applies to the entirety of this game. The different circles of hell are all thematically appropriate, filled with twisted horrors, whores, juicy disgusting teeth, disgusting tentacles, breasts that spew aborted babies, and plenty of other macabre spooks that even Dante Alighieri himself probably never could have imagined in his worst nightmares.
While on the subject, we may as well address the elephant in the room - Dante's Inferno actually has little to nothing to do with the Divine Comedy. That I can remember. In all honesty, I have all three books and never even finished Inferno. I'm sure the different circles probably match up with their descriptions, but the similarities probably stop there,
Dante must atone for his Sins and save his wife, who is taken to the underworld because he's a lying sack of neandrathal shit who can't keep it in his pants. You knew that, that applies universally to all of us men - we are all garbage because we are members of the heterogametic sex. So, he has to go fight through hell and murder everything that ever existed in the underworld. Kind of like a twisted, rewritten Orpheus and Eurydice minus the fact that Dante probably deserves what happens to him.
Thankfully his indiscretions allow us the opportunity to hack and slash our way through Hell, killing anything and everything that exists with a diverse and splendid array of Unholy and Holy magic, not to mention a badass scythe we took by killing Death himself.
The hackey slashey parts aren't much more original than God of War, Ninja Gaiden, DmC, Heavenly Sword, Darksiders, or any other similar game, but that never really relates to the challenge of surviving your way through Hell. In fact, the most disappointing game-play related aspect of the game is that Satan is actually easier than all of the previous bosses.
Dante's Inferno is a masterpiece of a game - niche though it may be - and accomplishes everything it is supposed to without flaw. It may not go down in history as a masterpiece on the level of its source material - and thank god, because why should it - but hack and slash games don't get much better. The only points it loses are for some occasionally frustrating platforming elements or puzzles.