Review: DMC Devil May Cry

          My first experience with the Devil May Cry franchise was back on the PS2 when I purchased Devil May Cry 2. I really liked that game despite its issues (like a static camera that made navigation and combat somewhat annoying at times) and I thought that Dante, the protagonist, was super cool. Now, for the fifth instalment in the franchise, Capcom has decided to go for a reimagining of the series and start again from a new beginning. Many fans, choosing to live up to the word’s origin of fanatical, flipped out over changes that were being made to the story and mostly to the look of their beloved, badass hero Dante.

         

I’ll admit that I too was a little put-off by what was initially shown and that handing the series to a new studio was worrisome, but as the project developed and gameplay footage was released I found myself more and more interested in what Ninja Theory was doing with the franchise. Now that I’ve played through the game multiple times (6 complete times actually, plus I replayed a bunch of specific levels) I have to say that I am actually glad they chose to reboot the franchise and handed it over to another studio. What Ninja Theory has put together with DMC is in my opinion the best Devil May Cry game yet.

         

All of the core themes and pillars of Devil May Cry are more or less intact in DMC. Dante is still a half demon who kills other demons, he is still a badass and the gameplay remains fast and fun while still also offering a lot of depth and challenge. The story and world though have been set up quite differently and I feel it makes for a much stronger since of who Dante is and why he fights, as well as what the end goal is and how every level is building to that.

         

In this new story Dante is the product of a forbidden relationship between a Demon and an Angel. This makes Dante a Nephillim and only a Nephillim can kill the Demon King Mundas. Mundas is the one responsible for killing Dante’s mother and imprisoning his father in Hell. Thus Mundas has had his demons hunt Dante for his entire life, to finish what he started and eliminate his only threat. What Mundas doesn’t know, however, is that when Dante’s mother gave birth, she gave birth to twins. Vergil is the only other Nephillim and after being separated from Dante ever since Mundas’s attack on their family he has finally tracked his brother down. Together, along with a psychic named Kat, they plan to kill Mundas and release the human world from his control.

How Mundas enforces this control over humanity is something I found really interesting. Mundas controls the world through debt as well as having people positioned in the media to feed the public lies and selling a brand of soft drink dosed with chemicals to make humans passive and easily manipulated. He is basically the epitome of big-business, marketing and media control all personified as one being. The truth about how the world is and who is pulling the strings behind the scenes can only be seen in a dimension called Limbo that overlaps with our own. In it you see things differently, like an ad for Mundas’s soft drink called Virility is really just the word Gluttony, and of course you can actually see the demons in this dimension. This makes for some really cool moments where you see the world one way and then you step into Limbo and everything morphs or when witnessing the spin the media puts on a battle Dante had that destroyed an amusement park where it is portrayed as entirely Dante’s fault because no one can see the demons he is battling, just the destruction they cause that he is at the epicenter of.

The showcasing of the outside world’s perspective on what happens in Limbo is something I kind of wish was shown off more in cutscenes. Instead they decided to stick to focusing on the way that entering Limbo looks for Dante and how that world reacts to him. Messages both appear on the walls and are spoken by the world of Limbo itself, such as “Kill Him” and “Die”. The environment also regularly shifts itself, breaking apart, stretching out or closing in on Dante in order to halt his progression or to destroy him. This combined with the way objects can be suspended in midair and the world being able to, pretty much, look however it wants allows for some of the most interesting looking level design I have seen in a long time.

         

In order to navigate this environment there is actually a lot of platforming. Of course you have the standard double jump for traversal, but you also have the ability to quickly glide through the air, latch onto certain objects, pull objects out of walls and even pull entire platforms over to you. For most of my first playthrough I found quickly going from gliding to interacting with objects in order to make some of the harder jumps to be a problem, but in subsequent playthroughs I could do it with ease meaning that the timing takes some getting used to rather than it being broken or overly difficult.

While the platforming is cool, the combat has always been the draw of the Devil May Cry games and things are no different here. It is really easy to get the hang of basic combat in DMC because every weapon uses the same button combos. For instance with each weapon you can keep pressing Y to do a combo, press Y twice then wait and press Y again to do a different combo and press B to do a one-off attack. The reason for making every weapon so easy to use and for making every combo the same is because you can instantly swap weapons mid combo by holding down a trigger (LT switches to your Angelic weapon/RT switches to your Demonic weapon) or by pushing on the d-pad (changes what Angelic or Demonic weapon you have equipped to the triggers). While it may sound clichéd this allows DMC’s combat to be easy to pick up and play, but difficult to master as there is a great deal of invention in how you can go between weapons and how to approach all of the unique enemies.

Speaking of the enemies, it is rare that I applaud and enjoy enemy design as much as I do in DMC. Every new combination of enemies thrown at you in a fight makes you re-think your battle plan and what weapons you should be using. Enemies are diverse enough and complement each other in such ways that you can’t just button mash your way through them. Harder difficulty modes, such as Son of Sparda and Dante Must Die (Very Hard and Very Very Hard), make this even more apparent as enemies are given completely new moves and you face combinations of enemies you would never see on Easy, Normal or Hard. Even after beating the game multiple times I found myself discovering new ways to deal with specific enemies that would inform the rest of my battles with them. Usually you just need to know the one specific weakness the game tells you and then you can move on, but DMC embeds a lot more depth into its enemy encounters than that.

DMC is much more grounded than Devil May Cry usually is, drawing a lot of its ideas and structure from the world we live in today. As a result it loses some of its gothic art style that was always so intriguing. That said, it still manages to maintain the franchises over-the-top nature that made it a joy to play and behold. Limbo is also such an incredible setting that I feel it makes for a more compelling and consistently fresh looking environment than any that were previously present. The combat is fast, fluid & fun and the enemies are great. Because of this DMC is not only really enjoyable initially with your first playthrough, but it is among the most highly replayable games I’ve experienced this generation. If you have ever enjoyed a Devil May Cry game in the past or if you are a fan of action games this is a one game you shouldn’t miss.

Score: 4/5