How many of us who’ll eventually play EA’s new third-person Dante’s Inferno combo-fest will have ever read the famous 14th-century poem by Dante Alighieri? Heck, we pass muster only thanks to some required reading in college. Though it may seem like an odd fit for a videogame — the poem was about a walking tour of the nine circles of Hell, after all — executive producer Jonathan Knight convinced us of its potential rather quickly.

“It’s actually well-suited to a videogame,” he explains. “We want to capture all of the geography that [Dante] describes.” To that end, each circle of Hell in the Ninja Gaiden–esque actioner will be a self-contained, uniquely themed level with a boss at the end, culminating with Lucifer on Circle Nine. All the major characters will be in the game — Dante, Beatrice, Virgil, and Lucifer — with the story being slightly tweaked for this particular telling. Here, Dante is a soldier from the Crusades returning home to find his beloved Beatrice murdered, and he’ll literally kill Death and take his scythe (that’s the tutorial level) in order to break into Hell and go after her.

Though the game is “at least a year away,” as Knight puts it, we were already able to play part of the early Limbo level, and found that the team’s focus is on tight, 60fps gameplay. Wielding the scythe, it already seemed fairly easy to chain together combos against hordes of damned and blade-armed babies (yes, seriously). X is a light attack, Y is a heavy, A jumps, and LT blocks, with each button-pairing executing different mega-moves.

The coup de grace of our playtime — riding a giant minotaur-thing and using it to savagely rip the bow off a boat eerily shaped like a human being — left us optimistic that EA can carry the fast-action torch in the post-Itagaki era of Xbox 360. Hey, maybe it’ll even be educational.