New developer breathes new life into Devil May Cry

Posted by on January 21, 2013 in Reviews

DMC Devil May Cry is a best-case scenario for what happens when you take an established series and hand it over to a new developer to let them have a turn. The Devils May Cry up to now have been so very Capcom. But now developer Ninja Theory leaves behind the series’ trademark “you’ll play this battle over and over again until you learn the combos and you’ll like it” approach. They unpack this brawler neatly, carefully, gradually, patiently, giving you ample time to get comfortable, introducing new gameplay over the duration of the story, and fitting it all into a consistent framework. Every weapon is introduced with an easy “here’s how this works” battle. You can try a move before you decide to unlock it. The vocabulary of Devil May Cry — that’s a fancy way of saying the buttons you have to press — is intuitive and easy to remember.

Capcom has at last let someone make a Devil May Cry for the rest of us.

After the jump, God of War may cry

This Devil May Cry feels as carefully crafted as a God of War and every bit as rewarding. You quickly get the sense that your different attacks are specific tools for specific challenges provided by the various enemies. It’s not just the basic “slow hit for more damage against big dudes and fast hits for less damage against little dudes” template. It’s a tactical sandbox of air or ground attacks, resistance, terrain, mobility, blockers, support units, stunning, facing, and so forth. And while these elements are present in any good brawler, Devil May Cry makes it all very easy to wrap your head around. This isn’t a game that you have to figure out. It’s a game that explains itself and then lets you master it at your own pace.

Beyond the difficulty levels when you first play through, there are a spread of new game plus modes that ramp up the challenge by introducing randomized enemies, one-hit-kills, and one-hit-deaths. Collectible keys and unlockable challenges that you have to find on the map make the levels worth revisiting. I’m guessing it would take two playthroughs to unlock all the moves. This Devil May Cry is built for the long haul. Of course, it’s a scoring-based game, so you can always work the leaderboards. With short levels easily made shorter by the skippable cutscenes, this is an ideal brawler for just jumping in to see how you do, and then doing it again to see if you can do better than you did.

The first run through the twenty short missions is a consistent stream of discovery. You’ll fight two fantastic bosses and two terrible bosses. Fortunately, the terrible bosses are saved for the end when you already like the game. There are a few interesting story beats, but nothing to sustain it as well as Ninja Theory’s last game, Enslaved, which was carried by characters created out of the collaboration among Ninja Theory’s artists, the writers, and the voice actors (the chemistry between Andy Serkis and Lindsey Shaw was as electric as anything in an Uncharted game). There is nothing like that in Devil May Cry, which is the typical chronicle of a smirking badass discovering his secret destiny. This particular badass, Dante, doesn’t make much of an impression beyond the fact that he’s a reboot of the previous Dante. He’s less anime this time around. Now he’s more Twilighty. Basically, it’s a lateral move on the uninteresting character scale, but more of a draw to the demographic of brawler fans who are tween girls.

Oddly enough, most of the game’s character comes from the locations. And it’s almost entirely a factor of artwork, because the actual level design consists mostly of stringing boxes together. But these boxes are given impressive context by playing with a few tricks of limbo, the parallel reality where demons live. The idea isn’t explored very deeply, but it’s exploited just enough to make many of these boxes memorable. Add in some freaky dreamscapes and the aforementioned fantastic boss battles and you’ve got places far more interesting than the character who visits them. The music, which you can turn off, features dub gwar ditties like Get Your Body Beat, Deathbad, What the F**k Is Wrong With You, and Throat Full of Glass.

But you didn’t come for the story or the level design or the music. You came to see what happens when you use your glaives to stun that witch while using the axe to stop a chainsawyer’s charge so you can pull the shield off a little flying angel and shoot it down. Works pretty well, doesn’t it? Now try it on the harder difficulty level or for more points or to look for the hidden keys on this level. Who knew you’d be playing a Devil May Cry for so long?

4 stars
Xbox 360

  • BLAM!

    Never got how Dante was considered a generic anime badass. It always seemed totally self aware and clever in ways that rivaled or even surpassed the Evil Dead movies (at worst it was on par with Equilibrium). DMC4′s Nero almost seemed like a joke on every bad anime and God of War cliche in the book: crying cutscenes, disappearing block jumping puzzles, canned fatalities, almost like you were playing a brawler version of No More Heroes. Then you finally get to play as Dante and it’s endless skill based combos before a cutscene where he smirks at the vanishing blocks before SMASHing and bypassing them.

    Here are beefs I’m having with this incarnation:

    - The combo meter. A couple basic sword hit gets you an SSS rank? You had to be an artist to get there before, using over half a dozen different moves from at least two different weapons. It was the ultimate Tony Hawk-ish style challenge after you mastered the basics of surviving.

    - Boss battles. One of the great innovations the DMC series made was designing most bosses to allow maximum aggression. Constantly be in their face with shotgun blasts and pummeling. No waiting around for weakpoints to expose themselves for a second before repeating the pattern. The “Fox news boss” was the worst instance of this, throwing in summoned underling fights you had to slog through before getting another crack at him.

    - The story. There was hardly a cutscene in DMC3 that didn’t exist entirely for ridiculous gunkata fights. This game feels like you’re playing DMC4′s Nero the entire time where they have the bizarre assumption that I care about a serious story arc more than action. But now with lazy f-bombs!

    - Weapon introduction. A hallmark of the series was always having a crazy cutscene introducing each new weapon and all the crazy stuff it could do.

    Compare this scene from DMC4:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xmKtjlZOJfM

    To the last 20 seconds of this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BLIQ184EC0Q

    (Note how Dante is having a blast with a weapon named “Pandora” but shuts it before it can do anything more? Little details like that that made the old series a lot more clever than most people gave it credit for.)

    I guess I just think this series never needed a reboot. All it needed was to stick with what mostly worked in DMC3 coupled with the handful of improvements from 4.

  • Lizard_Dude

    Don’t trust Tom on the music; the Combichrist tracks are awesome. What do you want to listen to while brawling? A Japanese woman singing “Fly Me to the Moon”?

  • kofhwang

    Just how much platforming is in the real game? I enjoyed the fighting in the demo but the platforming just ruined it for me.

  • Bayonetta

    Yes.

  • Kevin Cardoza

    Funny…the comparison you just posted fully details why this reboot is an improvement. The latter shows a game where cool stuff happens all around you and the cutscenes are relegated to dialogue and setup. The former shows a game where you’re stuck watching a cutscene where all the cool stuff is happening instead of actually playing the game.

  • ANONYMOUS

    “But you didn’t come for the story or the level design or the music.”

    Actually, in the case of the level design, I did. The older games had excellent gothic levels that really gave you a lot of different situations to fight the enemies against, from traps you could spring if you weren’t careful, losing health if you stay underwater too long, to a variety of different spaces where it was clear the developers were trying to create neat and new combinations of spaces to play around with for the creative enemies. This game is a drastic step down in both enemy creativity and level design, which were shining elements of 1, 3 and 4.

    I don’t think it’s total junk, but I wasn’t the type who could get past Dante Must Die mode with confidence in the original games either. I don’t really care if they make it simpler and easier to understand, though really only 3 seems esoteric to me. This one doesn’t have the punch most of the time and even when it does, it doesn’t connect very well.

    I like your reviews, Tom and I always have, but I don’t like it when you write sentences like that. I know you are talking to a generalized group of people and not me or people like me, specifically, those who are in it for cool combos in a flashy, satisfying fighting system. And that is probably the biggest part of Devil May Cry’s identity, but I think taking the idea that a game’s appeal lies so much in any one place overall is less close to the truth of the situation I often feel comes across when I read your reviews.

  • Xisiuizado

    Well, after seeing this review, I’m going to give the demo another chance to catch me. Great review, thank you.

  • Donte

    After this review, Tom Chick lost all credibility.